Welcome back to our 2008 season, a series of five exciting concerts in Waynesville, Hendersonville and at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa/East Asheville.

Chamber music, as its name suggests, is best enjoyed in smaller, more intimate halls, and at our three venues, audiences may savor the music as it is meant to be heard—close-up and personal. This special relationship between chamber-music players and audiences works both ways: it influences the performers to “know” our audiences, personally, as we do. It is a symbiotic relationship, and it makes our performances a very special experience for all.

We make a point of holding receptions after each concert, so that, just as you would, hearing a performance “at home,” have the opportunity to meet the performers, converse with them and other audience members, to share your enjoyment of the music, ask questions about it, and experience the satisfaction of being connected, directly, to the music and to the performers.

The Swannanoa Chamber Players are a resident group of musicians who come from across the United States to work and perform together each summer. Many of the musicians have returned for more than ten years, drawn by the scenic beauty of the area, and the intimate relationship we have built with our audiences.

We try to arrange programs in such a way as to make you listen to each piece from a new perspective. The first concert of this season, for example: First, we play a beautiful, late, Mozart string quartet; next, the clarinet-cello-piano trio by the young Beethoven, in which you may hear him beginning to break from the classical period of Mozart and Haydn, and just start finding his own voice—almost like the pre-dawn twilight of the Romantic period; we follow this with Dvořák's luscious piano quintet, in which you hear the Romantic period's rich melodies, harmonies, nationalism, and deep emotional expression, at its very peak—a vast contrast to the high Classical period from which it developed.

Similarly, in our third concert, we explore the influence of jazz in Western music: we start with a piece for virtuoso piccolo trumpet by Telemann, which, at first, seems to have nothing to do with jazz—but which comes from the Baroque period in which performers routinely were called upon to ornament written music—to improvise; we follow this with this year's world premiere, a new work with jazz implications by Ronald Newman; we end with Debussy's only string quartet, one in which you can begin to hear foreshadowings of the influence of jazz on the music of Europe.

We hope that programming our concerts in this way makes each one not only musically satisfying, but intellectually satisfying as well. To this same end, we provide a free pre-concert class and demonstration, on the Thursday evening preceding each of the five concerts, at Warren Wilson College, where our audiences may learn about that week's program, and receive guidance to listen more effectively and get more out of the performances.

We look forward to seeing you again, and to welcoming you, if you've always wanted to become acquainted with the pleasures of good music!

—Frank Ell
Festival Director