29th Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival Launches BCMF Records

As it approaches its three-decade mark, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Long Island's longest-running classical music festival, presents a 2012 season showcasing the mix of renowned and emerging artists performing classic and new music. Offering one of the most beautiful seaside settings on the East Coast, this year's Festival features 11 events programmed by BCMF founder and Artistic Director Marya Martin-kicking off on July 26 with a free outdoor concert by the vibrant string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and continuing with programs featuring from six to 14 musicians playing music ranging from Vivaldi and Bach to Schnittke and Ligeti, and the world premiere of a work by Paul Brantley. And the Festival's first recording on its own label, BCMF Records, is to be released on June 1.

Joining flutist Martin on the 2012 BCMF artist roster are two colleagues who were also there at the beginning, in 1984: renowned artists Ani Kavafian, violin, and Fred Sherry, cello. The invigorating mix of more than 40 musicians also includes violinists Stefan Jackiw, Joseph Lin, and Arnaud Sussmann; violist Cynthia Phelps and Hsin-Yung Huang; cellists Carter Brey and Edward Arron; pianists Alessio Bax, Gilles Vonsattel, and Orion Weiss; and bass-baritone David Pittsinger (full roster below).

This year's programs continue in the Festival's tradition of what The New Yorker has described as "a piquant mix of classical and modern works," with chamber music gems by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms alongside music by Czech composers Dvo?ák and Martin? on four of the programs, as well as music of Gerard Beljon, Colin Jacobsen (violinist in Brooklyn Rider), Giya Kancheli, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke, and Carl Vine. "I think our audiences will love two of the newer works," said Marya Martin. "Dutch composer Gerard Beljon's Something Wicked for flute, piano, and electronic samples is music I can't wait to share with them. And Carl Vine's Café Concertino is a rhythmic romp which will have them on The Edge of their seats." (The full program listing is below).

And some examples emblematic of the Festival's exceptional groupings of musicians: violinist Joseph Lin, cellist Carter Brey, and pianist Alessio Bax performing Schubert's Piano Trio in B-flat Major; flutist Marya Martin, cellist Michael Nicolas, and pianist Orion Weiss performing Martin?'s Flute Trio; and violinists Ani Kavafian and Stefan Jackiw, violists Richard O'Neill and Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu, and cellists Edward Arron and Peter Stumpf ending the season with Brahms's String Sextet No. 2.

Paul Brantley's Swevens Sonata for Flute and Piano will have its world premiere performed by Marya Martin and Jeewon Park. Brantley describes it: "'Sweven' is a beautiful Middle English word that lies somewhere in the field of sleep, dream or vision, but is its own thing-a psychic value that apparently has been lost along with the use, and precise understanding, of this word. It was one of those synchronistic things that I came upon this much needed and beautiful concept as I was composing this sonata." Marya Martin performed Brantley's Syrinx-double, a work inspired by Debussy's flute classic Syrinx, at the 2010 Festival.

Tickets go on sale June 1 and may be purchased on the festival's website, www.bcmf.org, or by calling 212-741-9403 before July 19; after July 19, 633-537-6368.