By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
Chamber Music Amarillo will welcome the new year with a trip to the jungle.
The group's annual Concerto Extraordinaire performance — this year titled German Jungle — is set for 7 p.m. Saturday at Amarillo Botanical Gardens, 1400 Streit Drive. Tickets are $35 for adults and $10 for students. Call 806-236-3545.
The concert will feature Karen Takacs, oboe; Annie Chalex Boyle, violin; Keith Redpath, violin; Vesselin Todorov, viola; Kimberly Sparr, viola; David Schepps, cello; conductor Michael Palmer; and the Amarillo Virtuosi chamber orchestra.
They'll perform Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor, Alberto Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes and Johannes Brahms' Double Viola Quintet in G Major.
"The conception of the concert started with the Ginastera, celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth (in 1916)," said David Palmer, CMA's artistic director. "It's an exceedingly difficult piece of music to play — beautiful and exciting to hear but very, very challenging to play.
"We decided that that would be our centerpiece, and as it's going to take a majority of the rehearsal time this week in preparing it, we would have some other works that were more chamber-oriented than chamber orchestra-oriented. ... The Brahms is rather heroic in writng and large in its sound .... and the Bach (is) part of our focus ... (on) presenting local and regional chamber musicians (in the Concerto Extraordinaire series)."
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and at www.facebook.com/chipchandlerwriter on Facebook.
