Summer is the season when chamber music, that most intimate of musical genres, meets the great outdoors. At America’s destination festivals, you can find chambers by sea (La Jolla SummerFest), in the desert (Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival), on Montana mountains (Tippet Rise Art Center) and in verdant Vermont (Marlboro Music Festival). Los Angeles thinks differently.
We’re a town with a remarkable chamber music history, having produced a wealth of string quartets and other ensembles, but like so much else in L.A., our chamber music tends to be where you least expect it.
Last weekend that happened to be in two vastly different historic rooms built more than a century ago and featuring vastly different music. But they had one thing in common: a connection with Hollywood, far-flung and proximate. At the Doheny Mansion — the 1899 French Gothic, Moorish, California mission mishmash home of oil tycoon Edward L.
Doheny in L.A.’s University Park neighborhood — the New Hollywood String Quartet presented its annual four-day festival of chamber music, this year devoted to Czech composers.
Saturday afternoon there was lavish, lush Dvorák, Smetana and Martinu under the Tiffany glass dome in the Gilded Age splendor of the Pompeian Room, complimentary champagne included. Sunday afternoon, at Sierra Madre Playhouse, which was built in 1910, Tesserae Baroque presented a program amenable to 17th century period instruments, a booming modern baritone saxophone and a present-day clari.
