Two chamber music groups; the full spectrum of classical repertoire.

The Memphis Chamber Music Society and Blueshift Ensemble invade homes and coffee shops with music.

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Schubert to Schumann: The Memphis Chamber Music Society 

Marsha Evans, genteel and persistent, smiles sweetly as she describes how to present a concert in someone’s home: “I call it the invasion of the Chamber Music Society.” She has become a highly accomplished invader, having finessed it for 30 years as head of the Memphis Chamber Music Society. The great majority of concerts are held in the elegant homes of Memphians who delight in the idea of hosting performances of great music by terrific players in an intimate setting — music among friends being the guiding spirit of chamber performances.

It is fortunate that the hosts are accommodating to the idea since, as Evans says, “We really do move in. We move a nine-foot piano in if there’s a piano being used. We rehearse on Saturday, set up chairs, the concert is Sunday. That was a difficult thing to find people willing to do that.” Maybe at first, but not so hard now with several homeowners pleased to put up with the disruption in order to be repeat providers of the venue for an afternoon of traditional classical music.

After three decades, the society is locked in to its standard season format of nine Sunday afternoon performances from September to May. Not all concerts are in homes: The society has held forth at Opera Memphis (the Juilliard String Quartet, a collaboration with Concerts International) and is planning its May 2019 concert at Ballet Memphis. It also has had performances at the David Lusk Gallery, the first time when the art space was at the Laurelwood Collection. “I guess we behaved ourselves the first time, so we got invited back,” Evans says drily.

The gallery’s new location was the site of a collaboration with the New Ballet Ensemble last February. Evans had programmed a work by Stravinsky, “L’Historie du Soldat” (The Soldier’s Tale). This was a chamber music version for clarinet, violin, and piano — a shorter work of the original written for more instrumentation and dancers. There was no choreography associated with the smaller chamber piece, but that was about to change.

"One night I woke — boom! — and thought ‘Wait a minute, we could really make something of this because there are so many fine musicians.’”

The musicians were violinist Marisa Polesky, pianist Adrienne Park, and clarinetist Andre Dyachenko. As Evans tells it: “Andre said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this with choreography?’ So I called Katie Smythe. She said, ‘Sure, let’s go for it.’ I said, ‘You’re going to have to choreograph the whole thing and it’s a 15-minute work instead of 30, and we can’t have sets. And we’re going to be in a small space.’”

Smythe nailed the choreography, the trio captured the Stravinsky, and the gallery provided not only concert and dance space, but had a retrospective of Ted Faiers work on display, including a dominant one of a ballerina.

Evans has been pursuing those moments, where everything comes together, since the first concert. That initial one, however, wasn’t intended as the inaugural performance of the society. It was the seed that grew into an institution. Marsha was teaching piano at Rhodes College and formed a trio with violinist Max Huls and cellist Linda Minke. They were pondering where to play when it was suggested they contact William R. Eubanks, the noted interior designer. He was happy to have them. It also helped that he had a nine-foot piano.

Guests were invited and about 60 came for the concert and a dinner afterward. “People called the next year saying, ‘Are we doing this again?’” Evans says. ”So we did it again, and then one night I woke — boom! — and thought ‘Wait a minute, we could really make something of this because there are so many fine musicians.’”

Later would come a baroque concert, and then another with Memphis Symphony Orchestra conductor and clarinetist Alan Balter, performing Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet. It was an auspicious start for the society. Eubanks, by the way, offered his home more than 20 times and served as the society’s founding president. And the society’s first subscriber was Helen Overton — philanthropist, singer, and long active in the Beethoven Club — who told Evans, “The timing is right for this chamber music in homes.”

Some guest performers are brought in from elsewhere, but the most reliable musicians are local and come back time and again. “They have fan clubs,” Evans says. Susanna Perry Gilmore was concertmaster at the Memphis Symphony Orchestra until she left for the same position at the Omaha Symphony seven years ago, and her devotees continue to ask for her to perform with the society; she did most recently in September. Pianist Victor Asunçion at the University of Memphis and cellist Leonardo Altino, formerly at the U of M, are others with a fan base. The Ceruti String Quartet, in residence at the Rudi Scheidt School of Music at the U of M, is another frequent visitor, performing with the society every year. It’s in the midst of its three-year cycle of the complete Beethoven string quartets that started in 2016.

“What we can do to promote music by Memphians is keep bringing them back,” Evans says. “Our musicians are wonderful here. The symphony musicians, the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music, Rhodes, my gosh. We’ve just got so much talent here. I think it must be in the water or something. I love to have new people, but what works is to ask, as we did with Susanna, ‘Who would you like to play with next?’ You get variety that way.”

Evans programs with an eye to variety. “It’s easier for me to plan pieces I’ve played before, or that I know, so I kind of start with that and then branch out,” she says.

When it comes to baroque music, Evans says her go-tos are celebrated harpsichordist Alexandra Snyder Dunbar, as well as violinist Tim Shiu, who is with the Ceruti Quartet and “spent two years in New York studying baroque violin.”

And while most of the programming is traditional, Evans endeavors to place some contemporary music. “The fabulous young musicians that we have ask me, ‘Oh, do you know this piece? Have you heard this?’ and I say, ‘No, but I’ve gotten so that I can negotiate YouTube really well.’ That’s how I listen to the newer works.”

Evans has gotten deft at managing the organization. “When we began, the greatest appeal was the homes. Now people come for the music.” It’s successful, certainly. “But it’s not a big money-maker,” she says. “You just have to remember that the top number has to be bigger than the bottom number. Do your best to make that happen.”

The operation of the society isn’t complicated. Money comes from ticket sales, board members, and John Evans, Marsha’s husband who also lends moral support, good advice, and encouragement. Homeowners who want to host concerts provide the venues and longtime board member True Redd, an artist and designer, has created all the programs. “We rent the piano, the chairs, and glasses,” Evans says. “We pay people to do the catering, the bartending. We buy the wine. We buy the food. We now pay a bookkeeper. The most important expense is paying the musicians. We never pay them enough. Never. We really don’t.”

And when pressed, she will acknowledge that she can’t run the Memphis Chamber Music Society forever, “but I also don’t want to stop. I would like to see this organization continue to put the focus on Memphis music, but I also know that when it does get passed on to someone else, it’ll be different, but that’s OK, as long as we keep playing chamber music involving Memphis musicians. If you put the music first, if you start with the music, then it’s going to all work. It really does.”

The Memphis Chamber Music Society

The society presents nine concerts a year from September through May. A series of any three concerts is available for $150 per person, or single tickets can be bought for $55 each. 

Upcoming performances:

  • Perfect Harmony. October 7, 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the home of Drs. Benton Wheeler and Aimee Christian. The program: Victor Asunçion, piano, Giora Schmidt, violin, and Leonardo Altino, cello, perform Beethoven's Archduke Trio and Mendelssohn's D minor Trio. 
  • The Genius of Beethoven. November 4, 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shipp. The program: The Ceruti String Quartet, in residence at the Rudi Scheidt School of Music, continues its Beethoven cycle. The concert features Opus 18, No. 4 in C minor and Opus 131 in C sharp minor. 
  • Brava! Bravo! December 9, 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the home of Blanche and James Williams. The program: Soprano Kallen Esperian, pianist Gary Beard, and tenor Philip Himebook in a concert of Christmas and operatic favorites.

Shostakovich to Shotsberger: Blue Shift Ensemble

The definition of chamber music is, fortunately, pretty loose. A string quartet playing Mozart in an elegant East Memphis home is but one variant. Stretch that notion a bit to imagine instead two flute players at Otherlands Coffee Bar making a geometric arrangement of several music stands, lining sheet music along them, and then performing Philip Glass’ “Piece in the Shape of a Square” for two flutes, which requires them to play continuously as they inch along all the way around the setup following the score.

The Glass performance was done not so long ago by the Blueshift Ensemble, a musical aggregation of largely local classical musicians who play contemporary work in novel places. Its artistic director is flutist Jenny Davis, a Memphian who saw the need to elevate the presence of new work in the city. She was inspired in graduate school in Boston, surrounded by composers going to all the conservatories and music schools there.

“I found myself in their circle playing a lot of their music, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really fun,’” she says. “Playing new music, you get to work with composers rather than the traditional repertoire, orchestral excerpts, and what-not.” Back in Memphis, she saw that not much was going on in that scene. It was, for Davis, an opportunity to create a group with local musicians. Furthermore, it was a way to bolster her career. “Musicians in the twenty-first century have to go about their career a little differently than the traditional way of getting a job in an orchestra out of school,” she says. “Now, you have to make opportunities for yourself.”

But how does one choose the repertoire? “There are so many different kinds and styles of ‘new music’ these days,” Davis says. The programming might rely on the venue. “We did a concert at the Memphis Scottish Rite Temple last summer, and we tried to choose a repertoire that fit the mysterious-secrets feeling in the building, because it’s so old.” (The cornerstone was laid in 1909.)

"There’s a coming together of different musical genres and that’s also what Blueshift is trying to be a part of, to show people that there is such a wide array of contemporary classical music — something for everyone.”

The program was eclectic. The oldest composition was Steve Reich’s 1972 “Clapping Music.” The newest was the world premiere of Rhodes College music professor David Shotsberger’s electrifying “rag>>kwit,” a sonic foray for distorted electric guitar, two violins, viola, and cello. The evening ended with local troubador Harlan T. Bobo and his songs of broken love and living. Bobo’s chamber group arrangements were by Jonathan Kirkscey, a composer and cellist who has garnered acclaim for his soundtrack for Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary about Fred Rogers. Kirkscey is also a co-director of Blueshift, Davis says, someone with whom she can kick around ideas.

Other members of Blueshift represent top talent in town, including several who perform with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and also in the Memphis Chamber Music Society.

Blueshift collaborated most recently with the New York-based ICEBERG New Music, a collective of 10 composers that has done two residencies at Crosstown Arts. “That’s exciting because we work with the composer, workshop it for a few days before the concert happens, and found that we’re always learning some kind of new technique,” Davis says.

Performing at Crosstown Concourse, the Scottish Rite building, and Otherlands is also intentional. “It’s an important part of Blueshift’s mission,” Davis says, “to play this music in more accessible places where maybe someone who wouldn’t normally go to a symphony concert might feel more comfortable going to Otherlands and then that can introduce them to music they haven’t heard before. There’s a coming together of different musical genres and that’s also what Blueshift is trying to be a part of, to show people that there is such a wide array of contemporary classical music — something for everyone.”

Blueshift has been around since 2016, feeling its way. It has fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas, an art support organization that facilitates groups like Blueshift to apply for grants and sponsorships. The name Blueshift derives from the astronomical term that indicates an object moving closer toward the observer; the intention is to “bring concert music and art out of the concert hall and into the Memphis community.”

Toward that end, Davis hopes to eventually offer a season of five or six concerts a year. “It would be great to have, at least once a year, a concert that features Memphis composers,” Davis says. “It’s challenging to just have your pieces performed, so if we’re a new music ensemble in Memphis, it makes sense that we’d be playing music written by composers in Memphis.”

The busy Davis is also working on her doctorate at the University of South Carolina and is performance coordinator at Crosstown Arts. Through it all, she plays her flute as she has since the fourth grade. “There is something about it, like that you get to sing, but you don’t have to actually sing with your voice, which terrifies me. But I love all the colors the flute can make.” She recently heard a composer declare, “The flute can do anything.” “That’s not entirely true,” she says, “but it is true that there are a lot of things you can do with the instrument. I find that fun.”

Blue Shift Ensemble

For more information, go to blueshiftensemble.com where you can sign up for email notifications. Later this fall, Blueshift is expected to play a program of pieces for flute and electronics by composers Kaija Saariaho, Thea Musgrave, Mario Diaz de Leon, and Luciano Berio.