Rosebud Chamber Music Festival welcomes new and returning musicians

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

The fourth annual Rosebud Chamber Music Festival opens in southern Alberta later this month. The weeklong festival opens July 25, with an informal music reading party at the Haskayne-Kenney Mercantile in Rosebud.
The festival also closes in Rosebud, with a concert in Rosebud Church, July 31. Concerts will also be held in Drumheller on July 28 and in Three Hills on July 29. All concerts start at 7:30 pm. The Reading Party starts at 7 p.m. Additional events, including a children’s event, may also be announced.
Two new musicians join the festival performers this year. Marie Berard is a violinist, the concertmaster with the Canadian Opera Company.
“She’s a magnificent violinist, really one of Canada’s greats. Very in demand in Toronto and all over Canada and the world as a soloist,” said Keith Hamm, the festival’s artistic director. “She’s going to bring a really unique and really beautiful voice to the company.”
The second new musician is violist Florian Peelman.
“He is a really wonderful player from Belgium,” Hamm said. “He certainly is a very interesting character and interesting musician. He comes from Belgium, but he’s a citizen of the world. He’s really quite gifted. He’s (played) with groups like the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.”
The other musicians performing this year have been with the festival from the beginning: Hamm on viola, Sheila Jaffe on violin, Arnold Choi on cello and Peter Longworth on piano.
“One thing about having a really wonderful company of artists is that other wonderful artists want to be a part of that company,” Hamm said.
These musicians keep returning, and new musicians request invitations to come, he said, partially because the rural environment is a refreshing change from the large cities where they perform most of the year. But he’s glad they’ve discovered that Rosebud offers even more.
“I wanted to give classical musicians a taste of what artists and audiences experience when they come to Rosebud. That’s a very immediate sense of community and relationships with the community members,” Hamm said. “They [musicians] live in town. They share meals with locals. We do our best to introduce the local communities to the artists on day one. And then the entire week long, we see each other on the street and say hi. We have coffee together. It’s this relationship that lasts hopefully the entire week. And by the end, I think there’s a really strong sense of family.”
Rosebud has gotten to know the music along with the musicians, he said.
“Rosebud audiences are very new to the art form [of chamber music],” he said. “But because of the arts culture and the theatre culture that lives there, their minds are just so open to experiencing performance of all kinds. To see a whole group of people that are so new to this music yet so open to it and so receptive has been just incredible.”
To those of us who have not yet been to the Rosebud Chamber Music Festival, Hamm says, “Just come see this music. Come and hear this music. Forget everything you thought you know about this stuff. It’s really amazing.”
Concert tickets are $25, or $10 for students. Reading Party admission is by donation. For tickets, information and updates, see rosebudchambermusic.com.