Cara Lieurance

The Ann Arbor-based Akropolis Reed Quintet will finish off the 31st season of the Chamber Music Festival of Saugatuck on Thursday and Friday, with concerts at 7:30 pm in the Woman's Club of Saugatuck. Now in its 10th year, the unusual quintet of clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, and oboe has won seven national chamber music prizes since 2011, including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal and the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award.

Saxophonist Matt Landry talks to Cara Lieurance about the group's passion for new music and making new arrangements of popular works. He also describes Together We Sound,  the Akropolis Reed Quintet's Michigan-based contemporary music festival with a variety of performances and shared activities.

On Saturday, Aug 10 at Bell's Eccentric Café, The Red Sea Pedestrians and the Corn Fed Girls will unite to perform The Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road.  Musicians Mike Fuerst and Ian Gorman tell Cara Lieurance about what the album means to them personally, and how the two bands came together to unravel the album and knit it back together, by sharing singing and playing duties amongst themselves. Each group will play a solo set before performing Abbey Road. The album turns 50 years old in September. 

The Vega Quartet will perform Haydn's first published string quartet, Op 1 No. 1 to begin their concerts on Thursday, Aug 1 and Friday, Aug 2 at 7:30 pm at the Chamber Music Festival of Saugatuck. It's an optimistic-sounding work, says violinist Jessica Shuang Wu.

Wu tells Cara Lieurance about how  three of the quartet's members grew up together in Shanghai, before pursuing music in the United States. Today, the Vega Quartet is in its 12th year of residency at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where they will mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth by performing a series of his complete quartets. In Saugatuck, they'll perform his late Quartet No. 13, Op 130, and include the original final movement, Grosse Fuge. The program will be rounded out by a new piece, 13 fiddle tunes for string quartet (I ain't broke but I am badly bent), by David Garner.

The 11th annual New York Voices Vocal Jazz Camp, a training ground for aspiring jazz singers, is underway at Western Michigan University. Public concerts on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday will be held at 8 pm, and on Saturday, a 4 pm faculty and student concert will be followed by a New York Voices show at 8 pm.

Lauren Kinhan, Darmon Meader, Peter Eldridge, Kim Nazarian are the original members of the New York Voices, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary by recording a new album, Reminiscing In Tempo, which will be released on Aug 16.  They and Gold Company director/camp director Greg Jasperse joined Cara Lieurance to preview the week, and describe how the camp is meaningful to them for bringing the art of vocal jazz into the future.

Graeme Shields, co-founder of the Vital Organ Project, will offer a free public performance of Organ²/ASLAP (As Slow As Possible) at First Congregational Church of Kalamazoo on Saturday, Jul 27, beginning at 1 pm. (The public is free to come and go at will during the performance.) Shields has trained himself to stretch out the four-page piece into an 8-hour performance, which, he tells Cara Lieurance, isn't the longest performance that has been attempted. There is an on-going performance in Halberstadt, Germany at St. Burchardi Church that began in 2001, and is expected to last 639 years.

Shields talks about John Cage's groundbreaking, visionary works which changed our perception of music, and about how he has learned to hold the sonorities of As Slow As Possible for durations of 15 and 20 minutes before changing to the following notes. When changes happen that far apart, they become extremely potent. He suggests that people drop in as they can, and listen for at least one sonority change to see what it's like.