Critical Acclaim for CHCMF
"A brilliant performance ... eloquently played ... close to
the essence of chamber music." [J. Reilly Lewis, John Moran and Jeffrey Cohan]
Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, June 26, 2000
"A virtuoso at conveying myriad colors" ...
"The audience clearly was entranced ... flutist Jeffrey Cohan
captivated young and old.”
Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, July 14, 2001
"Baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan and harpsichordist George
Shangrow give
new meaning to the intimacy implicit in the genre of chamber music...
They
have forged not only an exquisitely subtle collaboration but also a
common
scholarly interpretation of how Bach would have had the music
performed.
"They responded intuitively to each other's rhythmic
elasticity and echoed
each other's elaborate ornamentations with what sounded like
spontaneous
inspiration... Almost as impressive was the silent attentiveness that
their
musicmaking commanded.
"Bach may have been composing for a soft instrument with a
very limited dynamic range, but the music he produced was exuberant,
joyous and lyrical. It
was these qualities that Cohan and Shangrow communicated..." Joan
Reinthaler, The Washington Post, July 16, 2002
"Jeffrey
Cohan has made Slovenian music a focal point of this year's Capitol
Hill Chamber Music Festival. The Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival
got off to an exhilarating start Wednesday night at St. Mark's Church.
Marking the festival's sixth year, artistic director and flutist
Jeffrey Cohan assembled a trio of concerts that brought to public
attention some largely unknown works -- including two world premieres
-- by active composers from Slovenia. From piece to piece, Cohan's
artistry was evident as he breathed life into his instrument, seeming
to find no limit to its sonic possibilities, ways of articulating
phrases and modes of expressing composers' personal styles -- as in
Brina Jez's beautifully moody "Three Little Pieces." Chappell gave a
brilliant account of Kopac's Preludes for solo piano, and Cain's
sweetness of timbre and vocal power suited compositions by Brina Jez
and Kopac." Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, August 5, 2005
Praise
for CHCMF
For Frederick the Great, a Concert
of the Same Quality WASHINGTON
POST Monday, July 2012
The second of two concerts in this year’s Capitol Hill Chamber Music
Festival, held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Sunday night, was devoted
to music from the Prussian court of Frederick the Great. The theme is a
timely one since Germany celebrates this year the 300th birthday of the
Prussian king who, besides being a brilliant military strategist, was
also a passionate musician. Fittingly, the festival’s artistic
director, Jeffrey Cohan, played a baroque flute that is a replica of an
instrument made for Frederick by his teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz,
now in the collections of the Library of Congress.
Cohan is a wonderful player who exploits all the richly expressive
potential of the baroque wooden flute with ease and subtlety. With his
partners, harpsichordist Joseph Gascho and cellist Gozde Yasar, Cohan
played sonatas by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Georg Benda and Quantz —
all musicians employed by Frederick’s at his Potsdam palace, Sanssouci
— as well as a sonata by the monarch himself.
Late in his life, Johann Sebastian Bach visited Emanuel, the most
famous of his several composer sons, in Potsdam. “Old Bach” was given a
warm welcome at court, and Frederick asked Bach if he could improvise
on a theme he had composed. Bach complied, evidently to the king’s
satisfaction. But later, Bach used Frederick’s theme as the basis for
one of his late masterpieces, “The Musical Offering.” Selections from
this sublime work, along with a Bach violin sonata adapted for flute,
were the culmination of a thoughtfully conceived and most enjoyable
evening. -- Patrick Rucker
At St. Mark's,Good Things Come in Trios
WASHINGTON
POST
Thursday, July 2, 2009
It's
probably fanciful imagining a large audience turning up to hear obscure
chamber music at the height of summer vacation season. But the mere 29
heads I counted at St. Mark's Episcopal Church for Tuesday's Capitol
Hill Chamber Music Festival recital seemed an especially pathetic
showing for such a stylishly played evening. St. Mark's, one of
Washington's more strikingly beautiful and acoustically friendly
churches, added just the right bloom to the gentle buzz of the
festival's period instruments. Tuesday's program -- commemorating the
200th anniversary of the deaths of Haydn and his little-known
contemporary, Carl Wilhelm Glösch, and the 250th birthday of François
Devienne -- was predictable for a festival whose artistic director,
Jeffrey Cohan, is a specialist in baroque and classical flute: All five
pieces played were 18th-century trios for flute, violin and cello. If
such flute, flute and more flute programming produced an inevitable
sameness of tone, these lesser trios by the great Haydn, and great
trios by the lesser Glösch, Devienne and their contemporary Franz Anton
Hoffmeister met in a middle ground of high competence (the dark-hued
Devienne D Minor Trio marginally more memorable than the other scores),
and all were played with lived-in ease and affection. -- Joe Banno
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About the Performers
Baroque bassoonist ANNA MARSH
plays Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Modern double‐reeds and
recorders. Originally from Tacoma, WA, Anna appears regularly
with Opera Lafayette (DC), Tempesta di Mare (Philadelphia), Ensemble
Caprice (Montreal), Clarion Society (NYC), Arion Orchestre Baroque
(Montreal), Tafelmusik (Toronto), Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Washington
Bach Consort (DC), and Musica Angelica (LA), among others. She
has been the featured soloist with the Foundling Orchestra with Marion
Verbruggen, Arion Orchestre Baroque, The Buxtehude Consort, The Dryden
Ensemble, The Indiana University Baroque Orchestra and others.
She co‐directs Ensemble Lipzodes and has taught both privately and at
festivals and master classes at the Eastman School of Music, Los
Angeles Music and Art School, the Amherst Early Music, and Hawaii
Performing Arts Festivals and the Albuquerque, San Francisco Early
Music Society and Western Double Reed Workshop. She has also been
heard on Performance Today, Harmonia and CBC radio and recorded for
Chandos, Analekta, Centaur, Naxos, the Super Bowl, Avie, and Musica
Omnia. Marsh has studied music and German studies at Mt. Holyoke
College, The Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern
California and Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
MARLISA DEL CID WOODS is highly acclaimed as a solo
artist, chamber musician, and orchestral violinist. She joined
Pershing’s Own United States Army Orchestra in 2000 upon completion of
her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees at the Cleveland Institute of
Music. Her versatility in different styles has been featured in many of
the world’s leading venues - from Bluegrass at the White House to
Brahms Double Concerto at the Kennedy Center. Ms. Woods has performed
with the Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Concert
Artists of Baltimore, Alexandria Symphony, National Gallery Orchestra,
Canton Symphony, Youngstown Symphony, and the Erie Philharmonic. As a
baroque violinist, she has performed with Washington Bach Consort,
National Cathedral Baroque Orchestra, Bach Sinfonia, Apollo’s Fire,
Opera Lafayette, Harmonious Blacksmith, and the Vivaldi Project. Ms.
Woods can be heard on the Eclectra , Lyrichord, and Dorian labels. Her
most recent recording with the Bach Sinfonia and acclaimed lutenist
Ronn McFarlane was selected as CD pick of the week by WETA 90.9FM radio. Artistic Director and flutist JEFFREY COHAN has performed as
soloist in 25 countries, most recently Ukraine, Slovenia and Germany,
on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present, and
has won the Erwin Bodky Award (Boston) and the top prize in the
Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua (Brugge,
Belgium), two of the most important prizes for period instrument
performance in America and Europe. He has premiered many concerti and
other works by Slovenian and American composers. He also directs the
Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival in Illinois and Iowa and the Salish
Sea Early Music Festival. He can “play many superstar flutists one
might name under the table” according to the New York Times, and is
“The Flute Master” according to the Boston Globe.
Harpsichordist JOHN WALTHAUSEN
has been heard in concert throughout Europe in Paris, Chartres,
Poitiers, Toulouse, Hamburg, Milan, Treviso, Innsbruck, Basel, and
Zurich. From 2015 to 2016, he served as Organist in Residence at
Sapporo Concert Hall in Hokkaido, where he performed and recorded in
cities across Japan. In 2016, Sapporo Concert Hall released his debut
disc, “De Fil en Aiguille.” Recent North American recitals include
appearances in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Victoria (British
Columbia) and Washington DC. He has also appeared in the Pacific
Baroque Festival, Paris-des-Orgues, Toulouse-les-Orgues, the Toul Bach
Festival, and the Internationale Meisterorganisten in Innsbruck. He
regularly appears as an accompanist and continuo player with ensembles
such as the Washington Bach Consort, New York Baroque, and the St.
Peter’s Collegium.
In 2012, he then won first prize at the Pierre
de Manchicourt International Organ Competition in Béthune, France, a
competition devoted particularly to North German music of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 2009 he was awarded first
prize in the American Guild of Organists’ Regional Competition for
Young Organists. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College,
and in 2011 he earned a master's with highest honors at the
Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris following study with
organists Olivier Latry and Michel Bouvard. In 2015, he studied
harpsichord with Jörg-Andreas Bötticher and organ with Lorenzo Ghielmi
at the Schola Cantorum of Basel, Switzerland where he was awarded a
Master’s in Historical Performance. Walthausen currently serves as
Organist and Choirmaster at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Glenmoore,
Pennsylvania.
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