Chamber Music Society concert honors founder Paul Schoenfield

The music will be personal for the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota when it honors one of its own, founding pianist Paul Schoenfield, with a tribute concert on April 6.

The concert, an homage to the composer/performer/teacher who died last year at 77, is profoundly meaningful for the society’s co-founder and artistic director, violinist Young-Nam Kim. He and Schoenfield met in Ohio in 1970, a fortuitous pairing that not only resulted in the genesis of the chamber music society but a close performing relationship that included several concerts at Carnegie Hall.

Kim planned the tribute with Schoenfield’s composing strengths in mind. “After many agonizing hours to come up with a meaningful program for Paul, I landed with ‘Paul & Nigun,’” he says. (“Nigun,” Hebrew for “melody,” refer to traditional Jewish songs.) “Throughout the many years of our collaboration and friendship, I learned that Paul’s most intense creativity dwells in the slow movements, and they are all in the spirit of ‘Nigun.’”

To that end, the concert includes six of Schoenfield’s own “Nigun” compositions, billed as “the central point of all his output,” and their surrounding movements, including “Three Country Fiddle Pieces.”

Opening the program will be a video clip of Schoenfield, in 1966, playing Modest Mussorgsky’s Promenade as part of one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. He went on to make his debut at New York’s Town Hall as a teenager and study with such piano luminaries as Rudolf Serkin.

But it wasn’t all a life of grand concert halls; Schoenfield also entertained patrons as the house pianist at Murray’s steak house in Minneapolis, a stint that inspired his 1986 piano trio Café Music, commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

“Paul was a true master composer of the tradition in that his affection and total understanding of his beloved old masters as well as the folk music of many genres were so complete,” Kim says. “I could consult him on any standard work, and he would know it inside out. Thus, snippets of the old masters or folk tunes will inadvertently sneak up discreetly in his music.” As an example, “Three Country Fiddle Pieces,” written in 1979, was one of Schoenfield’s first pieces to infuse folk music, electric violin and a drum set.  

The last segment of the concert begins with Antonin Dvořák’s “Dumka,” which Kim says is featured “because I can still hear Paul’s beautiful playing that mesmerized me when we first sat down to rehearse it” during their youthful days in Ohio. Concluding the program is “Adagio” from the piano quintet that Schoenfield wrote as his doctoral thesis at the University of Arizona in 1970.

Featured performers in the concert include Kim and his daughter, fellow violinist Ariana Kim; violist Sally Chisholm; cellist Anthony Ross; clarinetist Sang Yoon Kim, and pianist Mary Jo Gothmann.

“As we remember Paul today, what I miss most is learning from him while rehearsing hours in pursuit of our goal,” Kim says. “It was a great privilege for us to present many Minnesota and world premieres of his works with him at the piano.”

Event details

What: Paul & Nigun — Remembering Paul Schoenfield
When: 4 p.m. April 6
Where: Hamline University’s Sundin Music Hall, 1533 Hewitt Av., St. Paul
Tickets: $25; $20 seniors; free for students