Take this story as my opinion of the best of Portland’s five-week Chamber Music Northwest Festival June 28 through July 27. I missed only a few concerts in the summer feast, including Bach’s Mass in B Minor and one of the New@Night concerts that celebrate living composers’ music. The festival focused on J.S. Bach’s work and influence, but plenty more music was programmed to appreciate. I’m sure you have other or different favorites, but these are my Top Five.

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To begin at the beginning, it’s a rare treat to hear J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played live, and to hear a Caroline Shaw Bach-influenced piece, Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, in the mix. As rare was Shunske Sato’s beyond-energetic direction of the concertos. A 10-year leader of the Netherlands Bach Society, he is an early-music specialist who can play the violin any which way, including on a tiny Baroque period instrument. How fun it was to see him prancing around the stage like Mick Jagger while keeping the musicians in order. He played the first week of the festival and conducted the “Brandenburgs” in Eugene at the Oregon Bach Festival the night after the June 28 concert-opener in Portland at Kaul Auditorium. Both concerts were pretty much sell-outs. 

Jumping to the final week in the festival, pianist Gloria Chien, who can tell any piece’s story with sensitivity and precision, joined with radiant violinist Leila Josefowicz in Igor Stravinsky’s Divertimento from the 1928 Fairy’s Kiss, which Stravinsky rearranged in 1934. Even if you’re not a die-hard Stravinsky fan, the musicians sold this 23-minute piece to us in the “Latticework and Legends” concert July 24 at The Reser and later, July 26 at Kaul Auditorium. Josefowicz, back for the fifth year at CMNW, played without music, commonplace for many concert musicians – and she broke a string. She and Chien cheerfully picked up after the violin was restrung and carried on the lyrical piece marked by Stravinsky’s unconventional mid-century rhythms.

Zlatomir Fung won the cello division at the Tchaikovsky International Competition when he was 20 years old, the youngest ever and the first American in four decades to triumph. Now at 25 he’s even better, a shock of dark hair falling over his black-rimmed glasses, his body one with his instrument. He plays exquisitely and expressively, and was a rising-star musician to watch and to hear in two Brahms’ sextets that he played in three concerts: String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18  in the July 24 and July 26 concerts, and in the July 27 “finale,” the String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36, composed for Brahms’s spurned lover, soprano Agathe von Siebold. Both pieces lasted more than 35 minutes, giving six musicians time to shine.

When Fung plays, he’s hard to ignore, whether playing first or second cello, this time with such world-class musicians as fellow cellist Paul Watkins, violinists Soovin Kim and David McCarroll, and violists Beth Guterman Chu and Burchard Tang. Fung and Watkins performed some Béla Bartók pieces for cello and parts of Fung’s compositions at the final New@Night July 23 concert at The Old Church. What a pair.

A sextet, two of them, is a gift but a nonet AND an octet in the same concert are even more electrifying. “Powerhouse Strings” July 17 at The Reser and July 19 at Kaul was perhaps the best concert of the CMNW festival with Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-Flat Major, Op. 20 and Olli Mustonen’s 15-minute Nonetto II, where eight of the nine musicians were CMNW protégés and former protégés. They included Nina Bernat, who plays the double bass, not always an instrument we hear in chamber music. The ninth musician was stunning German violinist Carolin Widmann. The concert’s opening piece, Alistair Coleman’s Ghost Art Canticles for String Quartet and Bass, featuring the Viano Quartet and Bernat on bass again, was my favorite of the four world premieres this summer. Coleman, born in 1998, wrote his piece about American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s “Austin” building, a secular chapel of “calm and light.” From many angles, Kelly’s architecture inspired Coleman’s three-movement composition influenced by Bach, but allowing Coleman’s voice to come through clearly. As a boy, Coleman said, he grew up singing in a local choir, and recalls hearing Bach’s organ music “fill the church with a roar of sound.” The dynamics of Coleman’s piece varied to a much greater degree.

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The Olivier Messiaen 51-minute, 8-movement piece, written while he was in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, where he was fortunately able to locate a clarinet, cello, violin and piano, was the most moving piece I heard at the festival. Clarinetist David Shifrin, violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Clancy Newman, and pianist Gloria Chien performed The Quartet for the End of Time July 13 at Lincoln Performance Hall and July 14 at Kaul. I’ll let pianist/CMNW co-artistic director Chien speak for the piece, whom I asked to comment. If any piece needs and deserves eloquent explanation, it’s this one.

“It is simply one of the greatest compositions of all time. Beyond the extraordinary circumstances under which it was written, the work stands alone for its structure  –  the use of solo movements and the various instrument combinations, the octatonic harmonies, the vast dynamic range, and the spiritual and emotional journey it demands from both the listener and performer. There is really no other piece like it. The words that come to mind are: timeless, spiritual, transcendent, visceral, grotesque, earth-shattering, chaos, struggle, devastation, haunting, from the abyss (clarinet solo) to the heavens, personal, emotional, birdsong (first movement), harmonies, synesthesia, arc-en-ciel (middle second), suspended (with repeated patterns), heavenly, stained glass window, fragility, surrendering (final), hopeful (final), uplifting (final), revelation (final).

“The three solo movements are masterworks on their own. The clarinet movement: I remember the first time I heard the long note emerging from silence, barely inaudible, all the way to its absolute loudest. It was a revelation. The cello/piano movement with the repeated, uncompromising chords in the piano, is a testament to the cellist’s incredible bow control, determination and sheer stamina. The emotional depth is unparalleled in this work. The final violin/piano movement, with another repeated piano figure, ascends to new spiritual heights and lifts us toward something transcendent, before surrendering into eternal stillness. The sixth and seventh movements when all the instruments play together, stretches each instrument and instrumentalist, and pushed each of us to our limits, confronting humanity, devastation, but never compromising.”

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Postscript: My favorite “Bach” piece of the summer festival season was Oregon Bach Festival’s Passion for Bach and Coltrane played July 12 in Eugene’s Hult Center’s Soreng Theater. Written by Imani Winds’ former horn player Jeff Scott, the work artfully wove together Bach’s and Coltrane’s music. It was performed by a stage full of musicians: Imani Winds, the Harlem Quartet, and a tight jazz trio of bass, piano and percussion, and was narrated and driven by the poems of A.B. Spellman, 89. He read his poetry in a jazzy down-to-earth way, and the poems, for me, were no less profound than the music. The piece won a Grammy in 2024, but that didn’t influence my decision to love this work and its performance – promise. By the way, CMNW and the Oregon Bach Festival collaborated on several concerts this season, including the Mass in B Minor and the Brandenburg Concertos. Expect more collaborations in the future.