Leaf Peeper Concerts Season Preview

Clarion Concerts, a non-profit organization, will stage its 37th fall season of Leaf Peeper Concerts, a classical and contemporary music series directed by flutist Eugenia Zukerman. This inexpensive series is noted for its variety and the caliber of performers.

Multi-talented violinist Tim Fain returns to Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y. (Sept. 15, 7 p.m.). With his vast repertoire, Fain has emerged as a hypnotic presence on the multi-media presentation scene of classical and contemporary music. Fain ghost-played for Richard Gere in the film “Bee Season” and he performed on-screen in “Black Swan.” Fain also performed and co-arranged the music for the film “12 Years a Slave.” This concert will span from Bach to contemporary composers.

The second Leaf Peeper concert will be held at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Mass.  (Sept. 29, 5 p.m.). The Neave Piano Trio from Boston will perform music by Haydn, Bernstein and Brahms, plus a world premiere of a quartet by the talented American composer Dale Trumbore (b. 1987). Trumbore has recently released a much-praised CD of her choral songs on the Choral Arts label. The Neave Piano Trio (neave means radiant in Irish) has performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. The Boston Musical Intelligencer acclaimed their “expressive sensibility” as “first tier.”

At Saint James Place (Oct. 13, 5 p.m.) the Florida-based Amernet String Quartet will perform a new arrangement by Jeff Briggs of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Pathétique, a piece by Danish composer Freidrich Kuhlau, Alberto Ginastera’s famous Impressions of the Andes Mountains and Beethoven’s masterpiece String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132. Renowned flutist Eugenia Zukerman will join the quartet for the Kuhlau and Ginastera pieces. I keep a CD of Zuckerman’s marvelous-toned recording of that Ginastera piece in the car and often play it. This is a concert that I am especially looking forward to: In a review I once praised the “wizard-like artistry” of the Amernet Quartet.

Back at Hudson Hall (Oct. 27, 7 p.m.) New York Polyphony, an acclaimed choral ensemble of four singers who have won two Grammy Awards, will present new selections of Renaissance song, focusing on the soundscape of religious and secular music from Italy, The Netherlands and France. I heard them perform once and can attest that they are impressive and inspiring. They often make their own choral arrangements. Their blended harmonies are haunting, ringing in memory long after performance.

More information can be found at www.leafpeeperconcerts.org.