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The Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival celebrated their 10th anniversary last weekend with an amazing array of concerts from ten musicians. The festival also commissioned a piece for piano and string quartet to mark the occasion from Kelly-Marie Murphy.
“It was an absolutely huge success,” one of the festival organizers said, “the piece was really well received, and (Murphy) is a significant Canadian composer.”
The composer created a work for the Festival named, In a World of Motion and Distance, in three contrasting movements of fast slow and fast, the Festival program notes. It was played by director Alexander Tselyakov on piano with the Lafayette String Quartet on strings.
“The initial catalyst for the piece was in drawing parallels between the creative process and the annealing of glass and metal,” Murphy wrote of her composition.
The commission was funded by local and provincial grants the Festival applied for.
“We’re very grateful to the B.C. Arts Council and the Sunshine Coast Community Foundation … and for the significant composition from the artist,” the Festival’s artist liaison Margaret Skelley said.
This year’s Festival also pushed the envelope with trios performed by flutist Eugenia Zukerman, saxophonist Julia Nolan and Tselyakov on piano, and brought lots of Coast and off-Coast fans back to Pender Harbour.
