The Friends of Chamber Music season begins with a preamble concert at the Folly Theater, featuring the organization’s artistic co-directors cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Hyeyeon Park performing the complete sonatas for cello and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven. (Friends of Chamber Music)
The season brings a full-spectrum experience of the richness and variety of chamber music
There’s an oft repeated adage about the reward of a great journey: The real treasure was the friends you made along the way.
It’s particularly applicable to the journey of the Friends of Chamber Music, celebrating their 50th anniversary this season. They started with intimate salon-style concerts in individual homes and have become a star-studded roster of international artists performing in Kansas City’s most beautiful venues.
“We put friendship at the core of our DNA,” said Hyeyeon Park, Friends’ artistic co-director.
“Chamber music itself has long been known as the music of friends — music of intimate conversation, collaboration and trust. Onstage, it’s about the profound connection between musicians. In the hall, it’s about including the audience in that conversation,” said Park.
Park and her husband Dmitri Atapine joined the organization as artistic co-directors in 2022, the second artistic directors in the organization’s history. As musicians themselves with close ties to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they’ve performed in the series as well, along with many of their friends in the world of chamber music.
“We love inviting artists we already know and cherish,” said Park, “but just as much, we delight in building new friendships, both with musicians and with audience members.”
They started looking toward this 50th anniversary season just as soon as they began with the Friends. Many organizations use anniversary seasons for extravagant, pull-out-all-the-stops performances and events, but Friends brought a slightly different approach to their season.
“We were very careful to think in a way of how we can not so much celebrate with the finest and the greatest and the most amazing, which we already have,” said Atapine, “but we wanted to ask ourselves, what do we love about the art of chamber music?”
“We want the 50th to be about ‘Rediscovery of Chamber Music,’” agreed Park. “We celebrate our legacy, we rejoice in where we are today, and we look boldly into the future.”
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
“We very carefully snuck in all the great genres of chamber music,” Atapine said about the 50th season.
The season begins with a preamble concert at the Folly Theater, featuring Atapine and Park performing the complete sonatas for cello and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven.
“It is the most intimate way of making chamber music, two people on stage, right?” said Atapine. “So we are kind of opening with the very essence of chamber music.”
Their Golden Jubilee concert at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts follows, bringing in chamber music friends from around the world. The concert features Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 50, no. 6 (Haydn, of course, is considered the father of the string quartet), along with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet Op. 44 and Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, Op. 20, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.
“Mendelssohn combines every single genre of chamber music into one,” Atapine said. “There are places that sound like two instruments playing against each other, places that sound like two string quartets playing against each other, places that sound like a violin concerto, places that sound like a symphony. He creates an incredible wealth of textures in that work.”
The musicians for this concert include rising star violinists Benjamin Beilman and Maria Ioudenitch and the up-and-coming Viano String Quartet, Atapine and Park and violist Lawrence Dutton, formerly of the legendary Emerson Quartet, who gives the concert a “sense of legacy,” said Atapine.
The season also includes performances by pianists Angela Hewitt and Alexandre Kantorow, the Jerusalem String Quartet (celebrating their own 30th anniversary), The Tallis Scholars, Stile Antico and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Later the season brings two excellent trios in concert, with the McGill/McHale Trio and a rare appearance with David Finckel, Wu Han and Daniel Hope.
One of the biggest endeavors presented by the Friends this season is the complete Brandenburg Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach. “Bach stands at the root of so much of what we do now in classical music in the Western tradition,” said Atapine. Performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, each of the concertos requires different combinations of musicians, bringing together in one program 20 virtuosic performers.
The season finale again welcomes many players from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and plays with the past, present and future, performing Camille Saint-Saëns’ playful “Carnival of the Animals” along with a new piece by pianist and composer Michael Stephen Brown called “A Magical Carnival — A Zoological Fantasy of Endangered Wonders.”
The season is truly a full-spectrum experience of the richness and variety of chamber music.
“We are not just about this concert here and that concert there … the entire season is one journey,” said Atapine. “When the audience comes into the hall, they can get a sense of this journey, and this journey will last for at least another 10 years.”
EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY
Education and community building were two elements Atapine and Park insisted on strengthening over the past two years. Friends started the Young Artists Project, mentoring young string players through lessons and masterclasses with both local and guest musicians. Last year, said Atapine, 30 Kansas City kids were given hands-on chamber music experience and coaching.
Additionally, Friends offers free tickets to people 17 and younger.
They also started a new group for the 50th anniversary season for young professionals and students. Club35 is for concertgoers 18-35 years of age, who can, with a $50 membership, attend nearly every concert of the season.
It’s endeavors like these that remove barriers and elitism from the genre and the concertgoing experience, creating opportunities to make new friends.
Build enough friendships, Atapine said, and chamber music can change the world.
“Chamber music at its essence is a conversation that’s happening on stage between people who are open to engage, to discuss, to change their worldview,” he said. “It’s something that we need very deeply in our lives. That’s why we want to bring chamber music to the kids, to the next generation, because we see it as a model of what a perfect society could be.”
Friends of Chamber Music celebrates its 50th Anniversary Season starting in September 2025. For information about tickets visit chambermusic.org.
Atapine and Park Appointed incoming artist directors for Music@Menlo
In June, Music@Menlo announced that Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park were tapped as successors to the work of founding directors cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han.
“We are humbled by the choice of the Board of Music@Menlo,” said Atapine.
Atapine and Park were already closely associated with the festival as co-directors of Music@Menlo Chamber Music Institute Young Performers Program. Additionally, they perform with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, also co-directed by Finckel and Wu.
“To be entrusted with helping guide its future is both a tremendous responsibility and a deep joy, as chamber music is something we care about with all our hearts,” Park said.
Coincidentally, Finkel and Wu will perform for the Friends of Chamber Music this season, along with violinist Daniel Hope.
“They are, of course, a big inspiration for Hyeyeon and me,” said Atapine. “They are some of the biggest chamber music luminaries in the world of chamber music right now.”
Atapine and Park take over as Music@Menlo artistic directors in 2027, the festival’s 25th anniversary, and foresee these new responsibilities strengthening their work here in Kansas City.
“The two roles are beautifully complementary,” said Park. “Our work at Menlo will create new opportunities for collaboration, cross-pollination, a broader artist network, and even new commissions — all of which we hope will make the Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City even more vibrant, bold and energized.”
