Montreal Chamber Music Festival 2014 to Feature CANADA'S GREAT PIANISTS & More, May 8-31

The Montreal Chamber Music Festival, now in its 19th season, will present 22 concerts from May 8th through May 31st, 2014 at the historic St. George's Church, located at the corner of Peel St. and de la Gauchetière in the heart of Montreal.

On opening night, May 8th, 7:30 p.m. the Montreal Chamber Music Festival will launch the festivities with a performance by the estimable pianist André Laplante, the Dover Quartet, and the soprano Karina Gauvin. They will present the JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Vivian Fung's String Quartet No. 3 (2013). Ms. Fung's Quartet No. 3 won the Dover Quartet the Canadian Commission Prize for the best performance of a newly commissioned work at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition. The balance of the program includes Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44; Chausson's Chanson Perpétuelle, Op. 37; and excerpts from Fauré's La bonne chanson, Op. 61.

This year, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival has created a new series entitled Canada's Great Pianists. M. Laplante will open the program May 13th with Liszt's Soirées de Vienne from Les Annéees de Pélerinage. On May 20th, pianist Angela Cheng will perform masterworks by Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven, and Jon Kimura Parker will close the series on May 27th with the Quebec premiere of his piano arrangement of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, as well as William Hirtz's version for solo piano of Fantasy on Wizard of Oz, which he originally scored for piano four hands.

Another ongoing series in the Festival, Israel Connection, will bring some of Israel's finest young talent to Montreal, including pianist Inon Barnatan, recently named the New York Philharmonic's first Artist-in-Association, violinist Giora Schmidt, recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and violinist Itamar Zorman, winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2011. The first and second concert in the series on May 14th and 15th will feature an all-Schubert program, and on May 21st Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Zorman will perform virtuosic works by Leclair, Moszkowski, Prokofiev, and Sarasate.

The perennial favorite, the TD Jazz Series will get off to an auspicious start on May 9th with the celebrated, Grammy Award- winning composer, pianist, and vocalist Kurt Elling, whose only Montreal appearances in recent years are limited to the MCMF, followed by a jazz quartet featuring trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and trumpeter Jens Lindemann. An all-Klezmer program on May 23rd and a tribute to the legendary jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt on May 30th, featuring the Stochelo Rosenberg Trio add to the series' diverse offerings.

Other notable moments of this 2014 edition include a second evening with Jens Lindemann titled, "The Golden Trumpet" (May 17th), which will offer a colorful palette of works featuring the voice of soprano Shannon Mercer, a string quintet lead by OSM concert-master Andrew Wan, and the great Casavant organ of St. George's Church for the first time in the history of the Festival. On May 29th, the MCMF will also present "The Four Seasons" by Vivaldi and Piazzolla with Martin Beaver, long-time first violinist of the renowned Tokyo String Quartet accompanied by the Festival Strings. The Festival Strings are comprised of the winners of the Canada Council's Musical Instrument Bank Competition.

This year the Festival will launch "Bach's Lunch," a series of four free lunch hour concerts -12:10 - 1 p.m.-at St. George's Church from May 27th to May 30th. Works for violin by Bach and other composers will be performed by winners of the Musical

Instrument Bank Competition. Also this year, the Festival will double to ten the number of free -pre-season concerts in the series entitled "Concerts dans les rues," Sponsored by Domtar and presented at the Espace culturel Lapalme of the Place des Arts. The Montreal Chamber Music Festival concludes May 31st, with renowned violinist Cho-Liang Lin on his1715 Stradvarius "Titian" leading the Festival Ensemble in Mozart's Complete Concertos for Violin. This marks the first time ever in Montreal that these concertos will have been performed in their entirety in one evening.

Founded in 1995 by the distinguished Canadian cellist Denis Brott, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival has gained international recognition for its innovative programming and dedication to chamber music in all its diversity. St. George's Church, a 500-seat venue, offers excellent acoustics and represents an exquisite example of English Gothic Revival architecture. All concerts of the MCMF are recorded for WGBH Boston for future broadcasts over www.apmstations.org and www.npr.org reaching an approximate audience of 17,000,000 listeners. The Festival is also once again a finalist for the prestigious Grands Prix du Tourisme Québecois, after winning the prize in 2012 for the second time in its history.

For tickets, call Place des Arts (514) 489 7444 or visit www.festivalmontreal.org.