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From the New York Times June 12, 2001 MUSIC REVIEW By PAUL GRIFFITHS argemusic” remains enjoyably buoyant. On Saturday evening the program offered at this bobbing platform beneath the Brooklyn Bridge was of piano quartets by Mozart and Brahms, with Frederic Chiu at the keyboard. These two works were separated by Dohnanyi’s appealing Serenade for string trio, to give Mr. Chiu a rest and focus attention on his excellent colleagues: the violinist Carmit Zori, violist Scott Lee and cellist Peter Wiley. The players took a little while to get into their stride, but in the slow movement of the Mozart quartet, the one in E flat, Mr. Chiu was keenly alive to harmonic adventures. He also nicely shared the wit of the finale with Ms. Zori, whose expressive bending of intonation had taken a little getting used to. In the Dohnanyi piece, there was again a cheering sense of collegiality. This is an engaging piece — bumptious in parts, soulful in others — and it was performed in that spirit. The Brahms C minor Quartet is more, and more was duly made of it. Mr. Chiu’s first chords were a clamorous challenge, and later in the first movement he rose

From the New York Times April 26, 2001 MUSIC REVIEW By ALLAN KOZINN In recent years, the clarinetist David Krakauer has become a star of the klezmer revival by combining elements of traditional Eastern European Jewish music with everything from jazz and rock to African drumming and elements of Latin music. But he began his career as a classical player with new-music leanings, and on Saturday evening he gave a performance at Merkin Concert Hall that brought together his disparate musical worlds. Mr. Krakauer began the concert as a conventional recital, with the pianist Brian Zeger supporting him solidly in the Allegro from Janacek’s Concertino and in the Brahms Sonata in F minor (Op. 120, No. 1). Mr. Krakauer’s readings of these showed traces of his recent exploits in improvised music. In the Brahms particularly, his phrasing was fresh and animated with a sense of urgency that made it seem more like a vocal performance than a reading of a chamber work. There were touches from the world of instrumental jazz in the classical part of his performance as well. In the finale of the Brahms, for example, there was some overblowing, an effect used to give a high note

This article by Elaine Strauss was prepared for the April 18, 2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved. In some classical music circles, the dark cloud of despair hangs low as pessimists read doom into sparse attendance and aging audiences. However, quality chamber music concerts may be wiping out that cloud. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, founded in 1969, now sponsors more activities than ever before and entices concertgoers to compete for tickets. Bargemusic, making its home since 1977 on a formerly seagoing vessel moored in New York’s East River, plays to capacity crowds. The artists who appear at these high-profile venues are part of a musical community that surfaces, as well, at the proliferating chamber music events outside of New York. Members of the chamber music-performing community know each other, marry each other, and call on each other to flesh out performances from La Jolla, California, to Marlboro, Vermont; from Portland, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Their numbers are relatively large; Bargemusic alone estimates that about 100 performers play on their floating stainless steel vessel. The New Hope-based Concordia Chamber Players is an area example of the loose federations of performers drawn from a pool

From the Philadelphia Inquirer Weekend Section Friday, April 28, 2000 Classical Music By Charles Huckabee INQUIRER STAFF WRITER   The debuts keep coming for David Kim. In his debut season as concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he has led the string sections and taken violin solos in many orchestral pieces, and he will have his debut as a featured soloist with the orchestra in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy this summer at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. Sunday afternoon, he’ll make his debut in the orchestra’s chamber music series, performing in Dvorak’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major (Opus 87) with music director Wolfgang Sawallisch at the keyboard and two friends and colleagues in the other parts: the orchestra’s principal violist, Roberto Diaz, and associate principal cellist, Peter Stumpf. The program also includes two string quartets, by Ligeti and Mendelssohn. Though Kim, 36, has performed chamber music this season in New Hope with the Concordia Players, a group organized by his friend Michelle Djokic, he says he has had to turn down other opportunities because of his duties as concertmaster. “Everything was so new, and everything was 20th-century,” he said of the literature the orchestra has performed this season. “I’ve only

From The Philadelphia Inquirer February 15, 2000 By Daniel Webster FOR THE INQUIRER Seeking outlets for his interest in chamber music, new Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David Kim played Sunday with the Concordia Chamber Players in New Hope’s high school in a program devoted to a Valentine’s Day theme. The ensemble, formerly the New Hope Chamber Players, is guided by cellist Michelle Djokic, who designed Sunday’s program in the style of a 19th-century salon concert, mixing songs and chamber music. Kim, Djokic and pianist Gail Niwa, playing the Trio No. 1 in D minor by Anton Arensky, summed up a program of songs and a cantata by Handel that featured baritone Richard Lalli. Lalli is an engaging singer whose clear diction and fine sense of intonation guaranteed strong communication between stage and audience. Although the Handel cantata Dalla Guerra Amorosa was the big piece, it was Lalli’s ability to shape each of his six songs about love into taut theatrical scenes that made the group engaging. He began with Mahler and ended with Cole Porter, finding in each some distinctive note, some twist of text to give his performance thrust. In Rachmaninoff’s “In the Silent Night,” he matched vocal color and