Capital City Concerts Wraps Up Its 25th-Anniversary Season

For fans of Capital City Concerts in Montpelier, the series’ visiting chamber musicians are practically household names. Many come annually from New York, California and beyond to play with founding artistic director and flutist Karen Kevra — including soprano Hyunah Yu, pianists Jeewon Park and Jeffrey Chappell, cellist Edward Arron, and violinist Laurie Smukler.

All those musicians and more return for Capital City Concerts’ 25th-anniversary season finale this weekend to play in two celebratory concerts, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, at the Unitarian Church of Montpelier. Each performance has a different program of audience favorites and heavy hitters, such as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, and string quintets by Johannes Brahms and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

“It wasn’t just that we wanted to give people two opportunities to go, but [that] we knew that one concert would sell out and then people would be disappointed,” Kevra said by phone from her Cornwall home.

Kevra was inspired to found the series after studying with Louis Moyse, a flutist who helped found the famed Marlboro Music Festival in southern Vermont. She sought out the musician at his upstate New York home in the mid-1990s, when he was already 81, immediately after hearing his 1972 recording of the aria “Süsser Trost, mein Jesus kömmt” (Sweet Comfort, My Jesus Comes) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata No. 151. Kevra first performed the piece, for soprano, flute, string ensemble and continuo, with Yu singing; Moyse coached their rehearsals.

Kevra and Yu will reprise “Süsser Trost” this weekend. It’s the only piece on both programs.

“It changed my life and is the reason that Capital City Concerts happened at all,” Kevra explained. “I heard it 30 years ago, and I still think it is the most beautiful thing Bach ever wrote.”

Violinist Smukler has played with Capital City Concerts for years, bringing current and former students from the Juilliard School, where she teaches, to join her on programs. Smukler and a foursome of such string players — violinist Ari Isaacman-Beck, violists Tal First and Brian Hong, and cellist Samuel DeCaprio — will perform the Brahms and Mozart quintets.

“She understands what a high standard of music making is.” Laurie Smukler

Smukler regularly performs around the world, including at Juilliard’s satellite campus in China, and is artistic director of a chamber music festival in Blue Hill, Maine. She noted that the Montpelier series’ intimate hall, upstairs in the church, is perfect for chamber music. But she has kept coming back primarily because “the audience really listens,” she said.

“When you play a lot of concerts, you get used to different audiences. Some are really attentive; some are there for other reasons,” Smukler explained. The Capital City crowd, she continued, “is really with you. They want to be moved and engaged in the experience. That probably has a lot to do with Karen.”

Smukler credited Kevra’s musicianship and organizational skills for the series’ esteem in the chamber music world. “She understands what a high standard of music making is,” she said, adding that Kevra’s style is “not casual; it’s serious and heartfelt.”

Over the years, Capital City Concerts has commissioned four new works, including ones from Vermont composer Evan Premo and former Vermonter Jorge Martin. But programming generally leans toward canonical composers. Kevra performs in roughly half the concerts.

Her roster of mostly visiting colleagues includes the long-established Borromeo String Quartet but also local or Vermont-trained musicians such as Shelburne pianist Paul Orgel, Kevra’s former flute student Jillian Reed and former Northern Harmony singer Lexi Ugelow.

Kevra and the musicians usually arrive at program choices together. Pianist Chappell, who has performed every season since the series’ first, noted that this time Kevra chose what he’d play — the Gershwin and Franz Liszt’s concert paraphrase of a waltz from Charles Gounod’s Faust. “They are two of her favorite pieces that I performed over the duration of the series, so it seemed suitable to bring them back for this celebration,” he said.

Former state legislator Andrew Christiansen of East Montpelier has been coming to the concerts every year and remembers the first one.

“The thing about Capital City Concerts that appeals to me the most is, it’s so community based,” Christiansen said, noting all the musicians who return to the series year after year.

A recent Vermont House resolution commends Capital City Concerts for “a quarter century of delightful and informative classical music performances.” Asked if she ever expected her series to continue for 25 years, Kevra joked that the furthest she thought ahead in the beginning was: Should we put some concerts on this year and next year?

Since then, the artistic director said, she has realized that the series is about more than music: “I know that in many ways Montpelier is still hurting post-pandemic but also post-flood, and I feel a sense of obligation to keep the concerts coming.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Double Feature | Capital City Concerts wraps up its 25th-anniversary season with two star-studded performances in Montpelier”