NEWS
CCMS Celebrates 25th Anniversary Season!
“I’m absolutely delighted to announce the Concord Chamber Music Society’s 25th anniversary season! With the generous support of a few core donors and a handful of local businesses in 2000, we presented our inaugural concerts at the First Parish of Concord to small but enthusiastic audiences. Since that time, CCMS has grown into a thriving organization that presents performances by some of the finest musicians in the world and offers valuable outreach initiatives to our schools and community. I am so proud of what we’ve achieved together.
In 2024–25 we will celebrate our accomplishments by welcoming back several familiar artists, including the Juilliard and Jupiter String Quartets, pianist/composer Marc-André Hamelin, and many others. We will also revisit some of the musical works we heard at memorable performances over these past many years. Additionally, CCMS will pay homage to the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War with a special concert in March featuring works by American composers.
I hope you will partake in this musical extravaganza and I look forward to seeing you at our 2024–2025 concerts at Concord Academy, the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library in Lexington, and the Groton Hill Music Center.”
News & Reviews
“Five Musicians Provided Luxurious Sound”, Boston Musical Intelligencer, January 6, 2025
“The past year I have listened to music, almost nonstop, on CD or on YouTube, rarely venturing out to hear it live. Unsurprisingly, I have been stunned yet again at how much more live music has affected me. Sunday’s concert of the Concord Chamber Music Society, brilliantly headed for 25 years by the venerable BSO violinist Wendy Putnam, had journeyed over the river and through the woods to the warm, curvaceous, and embracing Meadow Hall at Groton Hill’s gorgeous Music Center. It amply rewarded the nearly 40-mile trek, reminding me of the power of chamber music played live by excellent players.
For this carefully curated concert, Putman invited the Amerigo Trio (violinist Glenn Dicterow, violist Karen Dreyfus, and cellist Inbal Negev) to play Beethoven, Dvořák, and Brahms in company with herself and BSO violist Steven Ansell.
I had, of course, known of Glenn Dicterow as the longest lasting concertmaster (34 years!) of the New York Philharmonic, but had never heard him in chamber music, and it was quite a revelation. He is a very powerful player, and although he did not list his violin’s provenance, it was absolutely striking. My ear gravitated to him the entire concert. This is a musician and an instrument you want to hear live. Wow. Tasking first chair in each piece, he commanded in an authoritative and stately manner.
His excellent trio mates were violist Karen Dreyfus (also his wife) who, like Steven Ansell, studied at Curtis. Their cellist is Israeli-born Inbal Negev who, at age 16, was one of the very fortunate musicians chosen by Isaac Stern to study in the U.S. She has been a prolific and successful composer since the pandemic.”
”CCMS Cured Depression”, Boston Musical Intelligencer, November 18, 2024
“The Sunday matinee concert journeyed from Ravel to striking examples of 21st-century Romanticism. BSO colleagues violinist Lucia Lin and cellist Christine Lee and CCMS friends Kim Kashkashian and Marc-André Hamelin joined violinist Wendy Putnam, the Society’s Artistic Director, in the all-star cast.
The spirit of Ravel’s farewell to his great precursor — more like time-to-turn-the-page than rest in peace — came across with unabashed eloquence.
Having thus landed in the world of 20th-century social Darwinism, we were ready for a change of pace, and that arrived with Yehudi Wyner’s Concordance, one of the fruits of ongoing productive collaboration between the composer and the Society, this one stemming from 2013... The arch of the narrative closed to spellbinding effect.
Marc-Andre Hamelin’s Piano Quintet, in its home turf premiere, brought a complete change of scene from the first half... Like probably most of our readers, I have had many chances over the years to hear Hamelin’s compositions.... Still, nothing had prepared me for the wave of joy rising up from the first shimmerings of the piano and the long Bohemian tunes in the strings, as the Moto Perpetuo first movement got underway.
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“This writer, having relished the group’s concerts since its founding in 2001 at the New England Conservatory, has been pleased to publish 19 enthusiastic Jupiter reviews, and we agree with the New Yorker that, “The Jupiter String Quartet, an ensemble of eloquent intensity, has matured into one of the mainstays of the American chamber-music scene.””
“This season marks the 25th anniversary of the Artistic Director Wendy Putnam’s founding of the Concord Chamber Music Society, and as usual, the society is presenting great and important visiting artists beginning with the Jupiter String Quartet on September 22nd, and ending with the legendary Juilliard String Quartet on April 13th. In between, various chamber configurations will involve local favorites including Marc-André Hamelin, and Putnam herself. ”
Wendy Putnam addresses a full house at Concord Academy for the opening concert of CCMS’s 25th Anniversary Season.
“This is the 25th anniversary season of CCMS and because this will be the final season for its founding director, violinist Wendy Putnam, you know it will be special. The opening concert will be a program of Beethoven, Schubert and Kati Agócs with the outstanding Jupiter String Quartet (Sept. 22). And the second program should be, if anything, even more special: Putnam herself and another outstanding violinist, Lucia Lin, celebrated violist Kim Kashkashian, cellist Christine Lee and breathtaking virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin in Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello; “Nowhere Fast,” a Piano Quintet by Hamelin completed in 2019; and the marvelous piano quartet “Concordance” by Boston’s beloved Yehudi Wyner, commissioned by CCMS in 2012 (Nov. 17). ”