With the support of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards and Cornell University's Department of Music, the Chamber Music Collective (CMC) returns to Ithaca this June, presenting three evening concerts that explore the theme of “recreation”—a concept that embraces renewal, transformation, and the collaborative spirit of musical performance.
All concerts, which are free and open to the public, will take place in Lincoln Hall B20 at 7:30pm on Tuesday, June 23; 7:30pm on Thursday, June 25; and 4pm on Friday, June 26.
At once playful and profound, the idea of recreation invites audiences to consider music not as something merely preserved, but continually remade. Highlighting processes of adaptation and reinvention, the festival presents performance as a form of creative play grounded in repetition and variation, risk, and delight.
CMC’s faculty and students bring this theme to life through programs that foreground rediscovery and transformation. Works by Adela Maddison, Amy Beach, Agnes Zimmermann, and Ethel Barns recover rarely heard voices of the nineteenth century, while music by Fauré, the Mendelssohns, and the Schumanns explores the lyric and intimate dimensions of Romantic chamber culture.
The festival also highlights acts of musical recreation in a more literal sense. Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457, reimagined through Edvard Grieg’s later addition of a second piano part, becomes a dialogue across time as it is performed on contrasting historical keyboards. Similarly, Brahms’s String Sextet in G major, presented in a piano trio arrangement, reflects the tradition of adaptation that lies at the heart of chamber music.
Contemporary creativity enters the program through a new four-hand work by Roger Moseley, while vocal repertoire—from Bach’s cantata In allen meinen Taten to songs by Schubert, Schumann, Hahn, and Charpentier—traces how text and music are continually reshaped in performance.
At the heart of CMC is a collaborative ethos: emerging artists perform alongside faculty in works including Beethoven’s reimagined chamber pieces, Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio, and Mozart’s violin sonatas, while participating in a shared presentation of Bach’s cantata that distributes instrumental roles across the ensemble. CMC is a laboratory for musical inquiry where historical instruments, improvisation, and close collaboration invite performers and audiences alike to experience music as something living, flexible, and endlessly remade.
