Palm Beach Chamber Music Society brings new festival to New York's Boscobel House and Gardens

The Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, which has brought high-quality intimate music-making to South Florida since 2013, is spreading the good word in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Specifically, the society is helping launch a new chamber music festival next month at the historic Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison, New York, about an hour north of New York City. Four concerts are set for the inaugural Boscobel Chamber Music Festival, beginning with the first concert in the farewell tour of the legendary Emerson String Quartet.

Set for Sept. Sept. 3, 5, and 10-11, the Boscobel festival also will include educational programs for visitors to the house, built originally beginning in 1804 by businessman States Dyckman, who remained loyal to the British during and after the Revolutionary War. It was rebuilt on its current site about 15 miles north of its original location in Montrose, New York, after it was demolished in 1955 to make way for a Veterans Administration hospital.

The house, rebuilt according to architectural plans, photographic evidence and about 30% of its original material, was reopened as a museum in 1961.

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The festival, led by violinist Arnaud Sussman, artistic director of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Society, will feature some of the leading performers on the international chamber music circuit, including violinists Jennifer Frautschi and Stella Chen, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, cellists David Requiro and Nicholas Canellakis, bassist Blake Hinson, clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and pianist Gloria Chien.

“I know for the quality of the musicians and the music we’re bringing, you can’t ask for any better,” Sussmann said earlier this month. “I just hope the audiences will know about it and be happy to come and hear the concerts.”

Who is performing at Boscobel Chamber Music Festival?

First up is the Emerson String Quartet, which will end its career of 47 years in the coming season. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist Paul Watkins will perform two standout pieces: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 8 (in E minor, Op. 59, No. 2), one of the so-called “Razumovsky” quartets, named for an aristocratic Russian patron of the composer.

The Emerson Quartet is regularly regarded as one of the finest American quartets in the genre’s history, racking up nine Grammy Awards and making more than 40 albums, including landmark readings of the 15 quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich and the six quartets by Béla Bartók. Drucker and Setzer have been with the quartet since its founding in 1976 at the Juilliard School, and its cellist for 34 years was David Finckel, who, with his pianist wife Wu Han, are artists-in-residence at The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach.

“The Emerson is, without a doubt, the foremost American string quartet of the last 40 years,” Sussmann said, citing as its chief quality “a total musical commitment to the composers and the music, and a level of excellence instrumentally and individually that’s matched by few groups.”

He said he hopes that future audiences at the Boscobel festival will look back on its beginnings in 30 years’ time and note that the concert series presented the Emerson in its farewell season.

“They are already part of musical history, and will be even more so once they’re retired, and so I’m so happy we have them on our first concert,” he said.

'We found each other at the right time'

The idea for the Boscobel festival came from Arnold Moss, co-chair of the Boscobel board of directors and a part-time Palm Beach resident who is a patron of the Chamber Music Society. Sussmann said Moss approached the society around two years ago with the idea of doing performances at Boscobel, and last September, the society played two concerts there in a trial run.

“We saw that there was interest. So we decided to take the plunge and start a festival,” Sussmann said.

For Boscobel, the festival came at a time when the house was looking to refresh its programming, said Jennifer Carlquist, Boscobel’s executive director.

“We kind of found each other at the right time,” she said. “They have many, many New York patrons who participate in Palm Beach. They kindly invited me down, and I was able to see what they do at the Norton and get to know those artists. We invited them up last September for a pilot program and that was just thrilling: It was a combination of a patron’s concert with a tour of Boscobel and then a family-friendly concert that occurred the next day out on the lawn. It seemed to be the ideal model for us.

“And that’s what’s carried us through going forward,” Carlquist said.

It was important to the house that Boscobel, which hosts musical programs already and was inundated with requests from performing groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, that the festival not be just a rental venue for another arts activity, she said.

"We didn’t necessarily want to sign on as being anyone’s blank venue. We wanted to develop a relationship where Boscobel could be a player and could be considered as important as the music, as important as every musician, and really be a part of the performance,” Carlquist said.

Most of the festival concerts will take place in the 5,000-square-foot, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned West Meadow Pavilion, which was built at Boscobel for events such as this, Carlquist said. Key to the appeal of Boscobel in general is its beautiful Hudson River landscape, the kind of view that was central to the work of the early-to-mid-19th-century Hudson River School of painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett.

No less an august personage than George Washington called the region “the key to the American continent,” Carlquist said. "When you when look out at Boscobel’s view shed, that is the America that he’s talking about. The key to the continent is right here, our view shed.”

Carlquist, a specialist in decorative arts who says Boscobel contains one of the finest collections in the country of furniture by Duncan Phyfe, notes that the landscape is a compelling lure for the chamber musicians, too.

"It’s really what’s drawing these musicians to Boscobel. They could play anywhere. But they are drawing inspiration from the landscape, too, and that’s just so rewarding,” she said.

The Emerson Quartet will play in the pavilion on Sept. 3. The next concert, on Sept. 5, will take place on the Great Lawn and feature the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms, the two most-celebrated clarinet quintets in the repertoire. Clarinetist Fiterstein will be joined by violists Frautschi and Chen, Sussmann on viola, and Requiro on cello.

Sussmann returns to the violin Sept. 10, when he and Pajaro-van de Stadt, Canellakis, Hinson and Chien will perform the beloved “Trout” Quintet (Piano Quintet in A, D. 667) of Franz Schubert, and the lesser-known Piano Quintet in C minor of the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, written for the same forces as the Schubert, using a double bass rather than a second violin.

Unlike the other pieces on the festival’s first program, which are among the best-known pieces in the chamber music canon, the Vaughan Williams quintet, written early in the composer’s career in 1903, is relatively rarely played. But Sussmann said he came across it while looking for a piece using the same instrumentation as the Trout Quintet, and was bowled over.

“I found this Vaughan Williams, which I haven’t played, and I believe most of the musicians on stage have not played. And I listened to it and thought, this is a masterpiece. Absolutely fantastic, it deserves to be heard by all audiences," Sussmann said.

Sussmann said he otherwise was trying to stick to the major works for this first edition of the Boscobel festival.

“Those are just some of the most beloved pieces, and this is the first festival we have, let’s not try to wander too far out there,” he said. “It’s the greatest chamber music ever written, and I have no problem playing it over and over, and 99.9% of the audiences don’t have any problem hearing it over and over because it’s just incredible music.”

The festival closes the morning of Sept. 11, when the same five musicians will repeat the "Trout" Quintet for a family concert in the West Meadow Pavilion.

Carlquist said the coming together of an iconic locale, historic American arts and architecture, and classic works of Western art music should be appealing to festival attendees.

“The wonderful thing is that quality rises to the surface. It doesn’t disappear even if you’re not a furniture connoisseur, as a majority of Boscobel visitors aren’t,” she said. “But you don’t have to be a connoisseur to tell quality, and experience quality, and enjoy quality. And that’s true of American classical furniture, and true of classical music.

“I am not at all a music connoisseur, but when you see the best, and hear the best, it can’t help but take your breath away,” she said.

IF YOU GO

The Boscobel Chamber Music Festival will take place Sept. 3, 5, and 10-11 at Boscobel House and Gardens, 1601 Route 9D, Garrison, N.Y.

Tickets range from $65-$85 for each concert. For more information, visit boscobel.org or call 845-265-3638, or visit cmspb.org or call 561-379-6773.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach Chamber Music Society debuts festival at Boscobel, New York