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Chamber Music Festival

June 13 & 14, 2024   |   Walla Walla, WA 

Pepper Bridge will be hosting two performances for the Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival. The goal of the Festival is to deepen the understanding and appreciation of classical chamber music while forging connections between musicians, audiences, venues and the greater community.


Wine & food available for purchase | food provided by The Mill WW




June 13 | Portrait of an Artist 2 - Jennifer Goltz-Taylor, soprano


Instrumentalists — who are all jealous of singers, by the way— tend to tease singers about their counting abilities. Well, instrumentalists, you didn’t count on soprano, Jennifer Goltz-Taylor. The PhD in Music Theory should make you a little nervous. And then you learn she’s a multi-instrumentalist, at ease with an accordion, ukulele or seated at the piano. And then you hear hear voice. Was that a Schubert art song? Followed by cabaret? Followed by the crunchiest of atonal modernism? Eerie sprechstimme? Klezmer? French grand opera? Yes to all of the above.

There’s not much to tease, here. So best to embrace it and save your jokes for the viola. Tonight, Jennifer brings a recital of her favorite songs from the 20th century with pianist Ronaldo Rolim, featuring music of Rachmaninov, Barber, Poulenc, Debussy, Respighi, and more.

All works will announced from the stage.

Tickets

June 14 | Tasting Music 2 - Love Songs


All humans the world over have two things in common. We share both the capacity to suffer and the right to be happy. Nowhere are these two states more perfectly encapsulated than in the Love Song.

In Verdi’s La Traviata, Violetta and Alfredo sing a great duet. He sings about his love for her, “the torment and delight of his heart.” He feels suffering and happiness simultaneously. She sings back that she just wants to be friends. Of course, she’s in love with him, too, but she is from a lower class. Turns out Alfredo’s meddling father— who just loves his son, and wants his daughter to have prospects— has coerced Violetta into professing a false sentiment. The lovers just want to be happy, but they suffer instead. By the time everyone comes around (and back onstage), convinced of and happy in the purity and goodness of the love between Violetta and Alfredo, Violetta’s pesky tuberculosis flares up one final time, bringing the whole affair to a tragic conclusion, brief happiness supplanted by ultimate suffering.

In a nutshell.

And that is what a Love Song is, the human condition of suffering and happiness in a nutshell. Of course, we are not an opera festival, but a chamber music festival. Therefore, we look to smaller forms, in this case, love songs in Chinese and Spanish by Bright Sheng and Joaquin Turina.

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