Nicholas Mathew launches an exciting and experimental new musical enterprise this summer: the Chamber Music Collective. Other founding members include the Turkish virtuosa Sezi Seskir, the British violinist Lucy Russell, the Toronto-based cellist Kieran Campbell, and the American baritone and polymath Jean-Bernard Cerin.
The CMC is operating an investigative five-day course in period chamber music this June, based around the fabulous collection of instruments in Berkeley’s Nineteenth-Century Piano Collection.
The course will conclude with a wonderful weekend of public concerts featuring faculty and students, presenting chamber music both well known and hardly known at all — performed with a refreshing experimental ethos and sense of aesthetic daring.
Seskir and Campbell will also be performing on the main stage at this year’s Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, where Nicholas Mathew appears twice: in a recital of lieder by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Franz Schubert with the much-admired soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and a captivating journey through the colonial and diasporic early musics of Haiti and America with the bartone Jean-Bernard Cerin.
