Caroga Arts Ensemble Returns to Cooperstown Summer Music Festival

The Caroga Arts Ensemble, a collective of celebrated performers from across the country who gather each summer at Caroga Lake, will return to the Cooperstown Summer Music Festival for their fourth appearance. Founded and directed by cellist Kyle Price, the ensemble will feature the KASA Quartet, Cooperstown Summer Music Festival Artistic Director Linda Chesis, acclaimed clarinetists Graeme Steele Johnson and Bixby Kennedy, harpist Alix Raspé Gray, and bassist Kit Polen.

The program centers around a remarkable musical discovery: Charles Martin Loeffler's forgotten Octet, a 127-year-old work that clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson unearthed in the archives of the Library of Congress in April 2020. Johnson spent four years meticulously reconstructing the piece from the 75-page manuscript, creating the first critical edition of the music and revealing what he describes as a "previously unheard kaleidoscopic masterpiece."

Loeffler (1861-1935), a Berlin-born, Boston-based composer, was one of the most performed American composers of his time. Johnson's reconstruction and world-premiere recording of the Octet has garnered international attention, earning a full-page profile in The Washington Post and recognition as one of The New York Times' Best Classical Music Albums of 2024.

"After performances at the Library of Congress, Morgan Library, Harvard Musical Association and other venues around the country, we're thrilled to bring this rediscovered masterpiece to Cooperstown for the first time," said Johnson.

The evening's program will also showcase the artistry of the ensemble's wind, string, and harp combination through beloved works by French composers. Highlights include Johnson's octet arrangement of Debussy's orchestral masterpiece Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Ravel's Introduction and Allegro (originally commissioned in 1905 to feature the latest harp model made by Parisian publisher Maison Erard), and Poulenc's early Sonata for Two Clarinets, written when the composer was just 19 years old and performed by the clarinet duo of Johnson and Kennedy.

For Caroga Arts Ensemble director Kyle Price, this performance holds special personal significance as a kind of homecoming. "My family and I often attended Cooperstown Summer Music Festival concerts when I was growing up," Price reflected. "The Festival holds a special place in my heart."