Here's what's in store at the 2024 Rockport Chamber Music Festival – The Boston Globe

Rockport Chamber Music Festival artistic director Barry Shiffman well remembers playing at the festival with the St. Lawrence Quartet in the years before the Shalin Liu Performance Center was built, when concerts took place at the Rockport Art Association building across the town’s Main Street.
“It wasn’t air conditioned,” Shiffman, a violinist and violist, said in a phone interview. As venues went, “it was hot, it was sweaty, it was miserable.” Regardless, for the quartet, Rockport provided “some of the most exciting, fun, concerts of our summer, because you’d have 200 of the most diehard classical music fans taking in the concert and sweating with you.”
These days, with the climate-controlled Shalin Liu building as the festival’s home, attending concerts is much more comfortable. However, Shiffman still keeps that enthusiastic community in mind when planning the annual festival. “I’m always thinking of who they’re playing for,” he said. He wants artists “whose music-making jumps off the stage and really impacts those listeners.”
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If this year’s festival has a “throughline,” Shiffman said, “it would be the embrace of the new generation, juxtaposed with the pillars of more established artists.” As an example, Shiffman pointed to this weekend’s lineup: On Friday, globally acclaimed pianist Garrick Ohlsson opens the festival, while the next night the stage belongs to the young Canadian violinist brothers Nikki and Timothy Chooi.
Shiffman has been heartened by the board and trustees’ encouragement of his mission to introduce new voices to the festival. Last year, when Third Coast Percussion played, he said, the concert didn’t sell out — “but those people who went to the concert told all their friends, ‘Oh my gosh, I heard the most incredible thing last night!’” And the concertgoers who had been hesitant, he continued, “were like, ‘How did I miss that?’”
So Shiffman brought Third Coast back this summer for a performance with Canadian violinist Blake Pouliot, who previously appeared at the festival in 2019. “I’m really excited at that opportunity to be the matchmaker,” Shiffman said. “That’s where the real fun comes in, when you’re introducing artists like that, and you just know it’s going to pop.”
Pouliot, a Toronto native and past protege of Shiffman, is featured in two concerts across the second weekend of the festival. First is the June 13 concert with Third Coast, which presents Lou Harrison’s rarely performed Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra as its centerpiece. “It’s such an exciting piece of music, and it really doesn’t get the airtime it deserves,” Pouliot said in a phone interview from a New York airport. “I just think it’s spectacular.”
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The only “tonal elements” in the concerto are the timpani and violin, he said. “Everything else is just kind of percussive. As the violinist, it’s really fun to experiment with that.”
For the second concert on June 15, Pouliot and Shiffman worked together to assemble “half a chamber ensemble, half chamber orchestra” with several musicians, including Shiffman and the emerging Terra Quartet, which is itself another recurring ensemble at this year’s festival. “I’ve watched them from afar, and they’re becoming very successful,” said Pouliot.
Shiffman encountered the Terra Quartet in his capacity as director of the Banff International String Quartet Competition, where the quartet competed in 2022. Shiffman was eager to include them both to introduce their playing to the Rockport audience, but also to give the young quartet “some experiences a little bit outside the confines of just string quartet playing,” such as an evening of Chopin chamber music with pianist Eric Guo and cellist Colin Carr (June 22) and a cabaret program with soprano Sydney Baedke (June 21). “They’re such an open, generous young group, and they’ve embraced everything we’ve asked them to do,” Shiffman said.
To hear Pouliot tell it, performers might be enriched just as much as the audience by the Rockport experience. “You meet people, and you’re playing with them for six days. And after those six days, you forget what the world is like without them,” he said. “It’s really a surreal experience.”
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ROCKPORT CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL
At the Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport. Starts June 7. 978-546-7391, www.rockportmusic.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.
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