On Friday, the newly formed Portland Chamber Orchestra will perform in Gorham, showcasing chamber music ranging from the Baroque period to the 20th century. The PCO is a wide-ranging collective of local professional instrumentalists, with members described by its maestro and music director Robert Lehmann as “flexible and virtuosic enough to perform some of the most challenging works . . . performing the wonderful music written for instrumental forces that exist between the string quartet and the symphonic orchestra with artists of the caliber capable of embodying the triple role of soloist, chamber musician, and orchestra player.”
The performance will feature soloists Martin Perry on piano, and Kimberly Lehmann on viola, playing works by Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Alan Hovhannes, and Ernest Bloch, encompassing the range of classical music genres.
Vivaldi (1678-1741), wrote L’estro Armonico (“Harmonic Inspiration”) — a collection of twelve concertos — in 1711, the same year he was hired back by an orphanage that had two years previously fired him as a violin teacher. Concerto No. 11 in D Minor for two violins, cello and strings (Op. 3, RV 565), from this collection, will open the program. L’estro Armonico is known to have significantly increased Vivaldi’s European reputation, and this particular concerto starts with an elaborate fugue, uncommon for Vivaldi (unlike J. S. Bach, who loved fugal passages!).
Mozart (1756-1791) etched Piano Concerto No. 14 in E Flat Major (KV 449) as the first piece in a notebook of compositions that he kept for the next seven years. Completed on February 9, 1784, it was written for one of his outstanding piano students, and in comparison to Piano Concertos No. 15 and 16, Mozart commented in letters to his father that following May, “this one in E flat does not belong at all to the same category. It is one of a quite peculiar kind.” Indeed, it is one of only four Mozart concerti that starts in three-quarter time.
Pianist Perry, who divides his time between Maine and New York City, is working on a recording of Robert Schumann’s works on fortepiano, for Schumann’s bicentennial celebration. He also performs the complete piano works of Hovhannes, with whom he shares an Armenian-American heritage.
Hovhannes (1911-2000) was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, and is of Armenian and Scottish descent. His Talin Concerto for Viola and Strings (Op. 93) was inspired by Armenian and Middle Eastern chants, and a visit to some old Armenian ruins. Portland Symphony Orchestra violist Kimberly Lehmann (owners of broken violas take note — she can repair them!) will be featured.
Hovhannes once studied in Tanglewood with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, an experience in which Copland talked loudly over the playing of a recording of Hovhannes’s first symphony, and Bernstein remarked, “I can’t stand this cheap ghetto music.” Hovhannes presented his credo on music in 1941: “I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications . . . Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation . . . The superficial must be dispensed with . . . the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind.”
