News

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It has been a month since the summer festival wrapped up and I’m finally recovered enough to head out on the road for another month (O Canada!). In the interim, the Vuelta de España took place which, for those of you who don’t follow pro cycling, is the 2,000-mile Spanish equivalent of the Tour de France. Kiwi cyclist, Finn Fisher-Black, summed up his experience after the three-week race: "A lot of the time coming through a Grand Tour, your body feels a bit cooked, and as soon as it stops, it shuts down.” So yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of how I feel after NCMF and three months on the road - I’m pretty much toast for the rest of August. A wee period at home with me feet up was just what the doctor ordered.Or...maybe some time away from the viola riding my bike.

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I’ll have a photo gallery next week of personal highlights, but in the meantime, I've copied this terrific review of the summer’s festivities that came in from esteemed veteran classical music journalist, Keith Powers (he has a great website that everyone who loves classical music should check out). I feel he "got" everything we are trying to do here.  Thank you, Keith!

David Yang, Artistic Director

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NEWBURYPORT, Mass. — Even summer festivals have a tell. The Newburyport Chamber Music Festival claims two.

The first: soprano Lucy Shelton as headliner, which told on the festival’s repertoire — bringing in a sublime interpreter of contemporary art song to explore her expertise in multiple 20th- and 21st-century settings.

The second tell was more subtle. Each time artistic director David Yang tried getting his post-intermission audience back to their seats, he would say loudly, “We’re all here, right?”

The “we.” That’s the second tell. This festival is a “we” experience.

While blending sharply edged repertoire with a casually involved atmosphere, the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival — tucked away in coastal Newburyport, itself tucked into the northernmost Massachusetts corner along the Atlantic — has remained largely unchanged in its 25 years.

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The festival, whose 2026 season ran Aug. 5-15, starts with Yang, violist, chamber musician, theater guy. He comes to Newburyport with instrumentalists, composers, poets, singers, and actors each August for concerts, puppet theater, public rehearsals, house performances, and discussions.

Yang — who teaches chamber music at the University of Pennsylvania, heads the theater troupe Auricolae there, and runs a festival to this one, the Ashburton Chamber Music Festival, in the south of England — has a hand in everything here: puppet theater, pre-concert talks, and, of course, as violist in the perpetually active festival string quartet. He also writes prolifically: all the program notes and an impressive blog that keeps his audience connected during the year.

He raises funds the sweaty way: This year, he biked from Philadelphia to Newburyport, encouraging funders with just plain hard work and healthy fun.

The festival has no executive director; the omnipresent board members — a “help with the folding-chairs” board, not an “I just grew my hedge fund again” one — act more like caretakers of something special than a bunch of fancy people doing fancy things. Most attendees are repeaters, devoted to whatever presentation Yang offers.

The work ethic of the performers impresses. It’s a small cast, and they have services day and night. Violinists Lisa Lee and Isabelle Xi Durrenberger joined Yang and the excellent cellist Christopher Costanza for the unrelenting schedule. These aren’t just dedicated professionals but also artists who would rather extend themselves into the esoteric corners of their own interests than coast through easier repertoire somewhere else.

Having Shelton here epitomized the festival’s intimacy and exceptionalism. Her recent international appearances as the Teacher in the late Kaija Saariaho’s final opera Innocencehave simply added more luster to decades of interpreting the most challenging 20th- and 21st-century vocal literature. No listing of achievements does her career justice; simply search Pierrot Lunaire and Shelton’s name appears quickly. Not many singers make a Metropolitan Opera debut at 82, which Shelton did in April 2026 in Innocence. The nine decades of resonance and life in Shelton’s voice were essential to all her performances here.

Shelton reached for a vibrato-charged falsetto in Cathy Berberian’s exuberant Stripsody. Berberian, Shelton’s own precursor in the ’50s and ’60s as a boundary-less contemporary performer, compiled her own score for Stripsody from comic strips. There are no notes, just caricatures, wavy lines with syllable sounds, and lyrics like “KABOOM.”

Non sequiturs piled one upon another in a chain of goofiness; the graphic score made phenomenal vocal demands. It requires unique virtuosity; every one of the evening’s musicians came out into the hall to witness Shelton’s performance.She also sang two poems from poet-in-residence Rhina P. Espaillat in settings for voice and quartet by Jon Deak, a frequent guest here as musician and composer. Deak gave musical life to the underlying premise of The Jury, which premiered here in 2023. Four birds (underscored robustly by instruments) speak in bemusement about the plight of humans, suggesting gently that the birds simply wait out the humans until they’re gone. The poem itself speaks gently, almost condescendingly, about human foibles. But Deak’s score leaves no doubt — rushing, forceful, almost angry. The music’s relationship to the words felt distant, but the message doubled in effect. When Shelton entered as the last bird, Eagle, off-handedly dismissing the “small smudge” humans have left in a swirl of noise, it showed another side: The artist as a gentle interpreter, above the fray.That wasn’t all for Shelton. From the corner of a church hall, she intoned Morton Feldman’s solo from Only; she also sang four Copland songs, one of the Espaillat poems, and Berberian’s comic text in the same program. She capped the meditative Nachtmusik concert with an ethereal conjuring of an unnamed poem and performed at multiple Hausmusik and rehearsal presentations. An air of theatricality permeates many performances. The annual Nachtmusik program packs a small chapel full of listeners, turns off the lights, and forbids applause or talking before or after. No program, no notes, no discussion, just music. The festival quartet played a dozen small works and movements, and Shelton, hidden away from the other performers in a corner, closed with an a cappella poem. The result was mesmerizing: An hour of music in darkness alters the mind.

Other moments at the festival proved memorable. Pianist Kenny Broberg arrived directly from Spain, where wildfires had driven him from his home. He apologized for being unable to prepare his major work — Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz — and gave a warm recital of Haydn and Mozart, with preludes and fugues by Shostakovich and Mendelssohn.

Yang, definitely a theater kid inside, performed theatrical narrations with music for dozens of theater camp kids, and the season-closing octet performances (Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, the Moctet and Shocktet, as Yang called them), with the festival foursome joined by the Miró String Quartet, made a joyful farewell.

By Keith Powers
https://www.keithpowers.net/