BRATTLEBORO — What happens when a classical chamber ensemble performs music inspired by Brazilian popular song and dance in a jazz center?
Partake of this multicultural stew on Sunday, Feb. 24, when the Wistaria Chamber Music Society presents “Café Buenos Aires,” an evening of tango at the Vermont Jazz Center (VJC) in Brattleboro.
An hour-long tango class/demonstration for mixed levels, led by instructor Stephen Voorhees, starts at 2:30 p.m. The performance that follows at 3:30 showcases the talents of several of the more proficient students of that class alongside advanced-and dazzling-tango dancers.
According to David Perkins, artistic director of Wistaria Chamber Music Society, the performance aims to break down “artificial boundaries” in music.
“Listening to chamber music should not be like sitting for an exam. I'm not sure when that happened. It wasn't stuffy in, say, [Franz] Schubert's time, when the composer would improvise at the piano while his friends danced. At our café, I hope people will join in the dancing.”
In creating a nightclub atmosphere evoking Buenos Aires' European-influenced La Boca barrio, Wistaria will seat guests at café tables as tango dancers move to the beat of live music by Piazzolla, Pujol, Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, and Hersch.
“Music will be already playing as the people come in, setting the atmosphere of a café concert you might find in South America. And a part of the room will be set aside for dance,” Perkins said.
Wistaria, formerly the Chamber Music Society at Wistariahurst, is a group of professional and semi-professional musicians devoted to presenting the great chamber music of the 19th and 20th centuries in fresh and engaging formats.
Among the performers are Estela Olevsky, piano; Astrid Schween, cello; Junko Watanabe, soprano; Eileen Ruby, mezzo-soprano; Dúo Fusión, consisting of Sarah Swersey on flute and Joe Belmont on guitar; and the UMass Cello Ensemble directed by Astrid Schween.
“Café Buenos Aires” features 10 cellists from the graduate studio of Astrid Schween, professor of cello at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a well-known solo artist, in Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 with soprano Junko Watanabe, and other ensemble pieces.
Schween will collaborate with Olevsky, an internationally renowned pianist, and native of Buenos Aires, in works by Astor Piazzolla and Fred Hersch.
“The music sizzles when these two artists play,” Perkins said. “And Astrid's students bring tremendous energy and commitment to whatever she gives them to do.”
Moreover, the flute and guitar team of Swersey and Belmont (Dúo Fusión; www.duo-fusion.com) will perform works by Mexican composer Máximo Diego Pujol and Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. Mezzo-soprano Eileen Ruby will deliver songs by Argentine composer Alberto Evaristo Ginastera.
Perkins, who writes about classical music, theater, and dance for The Boston Globe and other publications, and is senior lecturer in the journalism program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says that the eight-year-old Wistaria Chamber Music Society is a family of musicians who enjoy performing chamber music in unusual formats and across genres.
Now separately incorporated, Wistaria has a roster of 20 professional, semi-professional, and skilled amateur musicians, most of whom reside in Western Massachusetts and give six to eight concerts a year.
Wistaria launched in 2005 as a performing ensemble with two or three annual performances at Wistariahurst Museum (www.wistariahurst.org) in Holyoke, Mass. Wistariahurst is the former home of two generations of the prominent Skinner family, manufacturers of nationally renowned silks and satins. Their grand estate and gardens have been a focal point in the Holyoke landscape since 1874.
The Skinner family owned the buildings and grounds continually until 1959, when Katharine Skinner Kilborne, the youngest child of William and Sarah Skinner, and their other heirs turned over Wistariahurst to the City of Holyoke for cultural and educational purposes.
“In an odd way, our group began because of the music room in Wistariahurst,” says Perkins. “As I looked around that glorious room, I said to myself this would be a perfect place to recreate the concerts of Schubert and Beethoven's era. From that concept, Wistaria Chamber Music Society was formed. I did some recruiting at first, but I am flattered how musicians liked what we were doing and often on their own were eager to join our ensemble.”
Performances of Wistaria have included a series of “Schubertiads,” salon-style concerts of Franz Schubert's music performed in period costume, now in their eighth year.
The ensemble also has fashioned concerts around seasonal visits to the circle of Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms and tributes to the French impressionists (painters and composers) and the avant-garde Paris salon of the Princesse Ghislaine de Polignac.
Other programs have saluted “American mavericks” such as Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, who composed and performed under the name Mrs. H.H.A. Beach; Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Curt Cacioppo.
Back to Brazil
Perkins says Wistaria began to explore this vein of music because Schween, Olevsky, and several of their students were particularly versed in that idiom: “Our first ventures into this territory proved so popular, we decided to follow up with another series of concerts.”
In addition to the VJC performance, “Café Buenos Aires” is headed for Boston and Greenfield, Mass.