Press
2025
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Adrian Steele, Devin Moore, and Joshua McClendon of the Isidore Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, Apr 29, 2025, KPAC 88.3 FM
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Max Ball and Drew Dansby of the Poiesis Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, Feb 26, 2025, KPAC 88.3 FM
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Daniel Anastasio and Raman Ramakrishnan of the 3Esprit Trio
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, Jan 23, 2025, KPAC 88.3 FM
2024
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Abigail Rojansky of the Verona Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, November 11, 2024, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin and Pablo Aslan of Viva Tango!
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Barnaby Smith of Voces8
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, October 10, 2024, KPAC 88.3FM
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, April 25, 2024, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with Daniel McDonough of the Jupiter String Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, Febuary 26, 2024, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake's interview with the Balourdet String Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, January 16, 2024, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Terry Sweeney of Sandbox Percussion
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, February 6, 2023, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Isidore String Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, April 18th, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Brigid Coleridge of the Merz Trio
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, March 8, 2023, KPAC 88.3FM
2023
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Brandon Patrick George
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, October 4th, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Decoda
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, October 4th, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with the Parker Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, April 18, 2022, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Sharon Isbin
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, January 31, 2022, KPAC 88.3FM
2022
Special Feature with Mark Dover, clarinetist of the Imani Winds
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, November 10, 2022, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Nathan Cone’s interview with SACMS current president Allyson Dawkins and past president Nancy Shivers about our 80th Season opening concert.
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, October 12, 2022, KPAC 88.3FM
2021
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with the Kenari Quartet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, November 12, 2021, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Wu Han
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, October 12, 2022, KPAC 88.3FM
2020
A nimble, well-tuned V8
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 2, 2020
The trouble with perfection is that there’s really not much a critic can say about it other than to remark about its… um… perfection. Consider, for example, the British ensemble VOCES8, which is a more or less perfect name for an ensemble of eight voices. Presented by the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, the troupe appeared March 1 in Temple Beth-El. Read more
Listen to Nathan Cone’s interview with Jane Key about the upcoming VOCES8 concert
by Host Nathan Cone | Classical Connections, February 27, 2020, KPAC 88.3FM
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Kari Landry of the Akropolis Reed Quintet
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connections, Jan 23, 2020, KPAC 88.3FM
2019
Pleasing and challenging
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 14, 2019
The year is still fairly young, but it’s safe to bet that the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird gave one of the most engaging and ear-opening concerts of 2019, March 10 in Temple Beth-El for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society. Read more
Dance to the music, and vice versa
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 8, 2019
Searching for a word to convey the distinctive character of the baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire and its artistic director, Jeannette Sorrell, I settled on “presence” – the quality of fully inhabiting the present time, the present place, the present action, even the present body. Read more
Listen to Barry Brake’s interview with Jeannette Sorrell of Apollo’s Fire
by Host Barry Brake | Classical Connection, October 2, 2019, KPAC 88.3FM
Old school, new school
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date May 5, 2019
Last week brought two chamber music concerts with very different points of view, but equivalent pleasures. Read more
Pleasing and challenging
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 14, 2019
The year is still fairly young, but it’s safe to bet that the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird gave one of the most engaging and ear-opening concerts of 2019, March 10 in Temple Beth-El for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society. Read more
Remembering Tal
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date February 1, 2019
No collaborative relationship in the arts is quite comparable to that between a composer and a performer. The fruits of several such relationships proved fetching in two recent performances, by the Cavatina Duo (Jan 27) and pianist Viktor Valkov (Jan. 20).. Read more
2018
‘. . . men whose helmets now lie scattered’
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date November 14, 2018
It is paradoxical – or perhaps not – that the ugliest and most horrific experiences in life can inspire transcendent, healing beauty. A remarkable pairing of music with the spoken word made for a solemn, sometimes harrowing Veteran’s Day commemoration, Nov. 11 in Temple Beth-El, thanks to the San Antonio Chamber Music Society. Read more
Lots of music from the new world
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 10, 2018
Music made in America figured prominently on concerts this week by the American Brass Quintet (March 4) and the San Antonio Symphony (March 9). Read more
2017
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 18, 2017
Both of San Antonio’s most venerable presenting organizations opened their seasons in the past week. The Tuesday Musical Club has been around since 1901, but its Artist Series is just 95 years old. It opened with a collaboration by two local products in the early stages of significant careers, cellist Christine Lamprea and pianist Daniel Anastasio, Oct. 10 in Laurel Heights United Methodist Church. Then the San Antonio Chamber Music Society launched its 75th season on Oct. 15 with a concert in Temple Beth-El by guitarist Sharon Isbin and the Pacifica String Quartet. Read more
Homecoming & other returns
An odd mix, perfectly melded
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 4, 2017
A mostly French program played by the top-drawer (if slightly oddball) Les Amies Trio, based in New York, made for a perfect afternoon on the San Antonio Chamber Music Society concert series, Feb. 26 in Temple Beth-El. Read more
Les Amies Trio Captivates With The Music Of France
By Texas Public Radio publish date March 4, 2017
The Les Amies Trio- a collaboration of artists with a sense of purpose, a sense of class, and a sense of humor, graced the San Antonio Chamber Music Society’s 74th season with a performance last Sunday, February 26th, 2017 at Temple Beth-El. Read more
2016
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 27, 2016
The supremely polished Danish String Quartet made its San Antonio debut with a landmark work of the 20th century, a fascinating piece from the present year, and a set of arrangements of Nordic folk songs of uncertain vintage. The concert, Oct. 23 in Temple Beth-El, opened the 74th season of the San Antonio Chamber Music Society. Read more
Three Danes, one Norwegian, all polish
Purrs like a kitten
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date April 6, 2016
The Dover Quartet, in its first appearance on the San Antonio Chamber Music Society series, called to mind one of those absurdly expensive Italian sports cars, combining top-drawer craft, nimbleness and luxury in equal measure. (One assumes, however, that the musicians – violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and cellist Camden Shaw – will spend less time in the mechanic’s shop.) Read more
Sounds from China, familiar and strange
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 3, 2016
The superb Shanghai Quartet returned to town on Feb. 28 with pipa (Chinese lute) virtuoso Wu Man and a program that leaned heavily to music by Chinese composers. The lone exception: Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, in one of the most luminous Beethoven quartet performances I can recall.
Read more
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date January 29, 2016
Concerts in recent days by the SOLI Chamber Ensemble and the Canada-based Gryphon Trio took Las Américas Music Festival to geographical extremes, with the world premiere of a delicious work by the Brazilian composer-singer Clarice Assad and two interesting pieces by Canadian composers.
Read more
Round trip, Canada to Brazil
2015
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date November 10, 2015
Strangely, for a prolific composer of great importance, Ernst Krenek is almost never heard from on concert programs hereabouts. The Zemlinsky Quartet from the Czech Republic mitigated the drought with a performance of Krenek’s String Quartet No. 7, centerpiece of a program that also held works by Mendelssohn and Janáček, for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society on Nov. 8 in Temple Beth-El.
Read more
Acquaintance and reacquaintance
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 14, 2015
Many years ago, I took a Caribbean cruise aboard Queen Elizabeth II, then the flagship of the storied Cunard Line. One evening a dinner companion, perusing the menu, commented invidiously about the virtues of English cooking relative to the French variety. Our unflappable (of course) English waiter observed dryly (of course) that the rival French Line had recently scrapped its whole passenger fleet, while Cunard of England was still going strong. There’s something to be said for the staying power of sheer competence, executing consistently without flaw, even if the results might not fully arouse one’s passions.
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There will always be an England
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 31, 2015
Some indisputably great musical works are so strange and idiosyncratic that a first hearing can puzzle — but also fascinate — even the most adventurous listeners. What on earth was that?
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The strange in dialog with the strange
2014
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date November 18, 2014
Most string quartets talk a blue streak (musically speaking) in German and are fluent in French, Russian, Hungarian, Czech and American, as well. Italian? Not so much, at least not in music after the baroque era, when the Italians ruled the roost. So it was a rare treat to hear an all-Italian program (without a baroque item in the bunch) played by the visiting Quartetto di Cremona, Nov. 16 in Temple Beth-El for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society.
Read more
A rare treat – chamber music from Italy
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date April 8, 2014
Somewhat odd programs, well played by the visiting Brentano String Quartet and the local Olmos Ensemble, were on the chamber-music bill for Sunday and Monday, respectively.
The Brentano may be remembered for a superb 2006 concert of landmark works that ranged from deep to deeper, comprising Schubert’s agitated “Quartettsatz,” Shostakovich’s mournful Quartet No. 15 and Beethoven’s Quartet in A Minor, with its slow movement a portrait of debilitating illness and recovery.
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Chamber music, high-minded and not
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 4, 2014
The Escher String Quartet of New York visited on Sunday with elegant, somewhat contained accounts of works representing Romanticism in morning (Robert Schumann), mid-afternoon (Antonín Dvořák) and dusk (Alban Berg). The San Antonio Chamber Music Society presented the concert in Temple Beth-El.
Chamber music, high-minded and not
By Jack Fishman – OnTheTownEzine.com, January/February 2014
Seventy-one years ago, Dr. Eric Sorantin, an accomplished Viennese musician, established the San Antonio Chamber Music Society (www.sacms.org). The website describes the group’s humble beginnings: “The first concerts were held in the west wing of the Municipal Auditorium. Founding members provided oriental rugs and other furnishings to create the proper setting for the programs. Guest artists quickly grew from local to regional to national and international in prominence.”
San Antonio Chamber Music Society | Celebrating 71 Seasons
2013
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 22, 2013
The American Brass Quintet’s concert, a rare foray into the brass repertoire for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, ranged from the 16th century to the near-present. One of the troupe’s trumpeters, Raymond Mase, created idiomatic arrangements of Renaissance vocal material, three madrigals by Luca Marenzio and five chansons by Josquin des Prés. These sounded wonderful in the airy acoustics of Temple Beth-El, even if the spacious sound took a little of the bite away from Josquin’s familiar “El Grillo.”
A feast of chamber music, new and old
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date April 16, 2013
A few minutes before the Ebène Quartet began playing a superb concert on April 14, a subscriber and a board member of the sponsoring San Antonio Chamber Music Society conducted a frank exchange of views in the Temple Beth-El lobby. Their discussion concerned the propriety of the program’s second half, described as “Jazz and Pop Standards, re-imagined by the Ebène Quartet.” The subscriber fervently hoped the fall from classical graces would not portend a trend. I confess some suspicions of my own, but they were dispelled by the outsized intelligence, fierce discipline and untethered curiosity the French troupe applied to the more-traditional first half, which comprised Mozart’s sunny Quartet in C (“Dissonant”), K. 465 , and Felix Mendelssohn’s dark Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80. It was clear from these performances that the Ebène was constitutionally incapable of anything cheap.
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Rigor in action, from Mozart to Miles
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 20, 2013
The bulk of the Brahms Festival occupied the month of February, but some welcome overflow extended into March, with important Brahms chamber works included in concerts by the Olmos Ensemble (March 11) and the distinguished cello-piano duo of David Finckel and Wu Han (March 17). The San Antonio Chamber Music Society was the host for the latter concert, in Temple Beth-El. Ms. Wu and Mr. Finckel are co-artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Mr. Finckel has appeared several times previously in San Antonio in his capacity as cellist with the Emerson String Quartet. (Ms. Wu told the audience that this was her first visit to San Antonio.)
Still more Brahms, and more
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date January 31, 2013
OK, so I’m no Nate Silver, but I did accurately predict more than half the races in the Jan. 27 vote. Three out of five, to be precise. The Miró Quartet, returning to town for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society concert series at Temple Beth-El, opened its program with an exquisitely refined account of Johannes Brahms’s Quartet in C Minor and then let the audience pick the works for the second half, dubbed “Quartet à la carte.”
Vox populi
2012
Reviewed by Robert Faires, Friday, January 27, 2012
Eloquence doesn’t get much play in the age of the sound bite. We’re so wired for speed and informality that in most communication, a bluntness of expression holds sway. But in Bates Recital Hall last Friday, the Miró Quartet and pianist Anton Nel proved there are still places where thoughts are composed and conveyed with craft, where time is allowed for a range of feelings to be explored and for fine distinctions to be drawn.
Miró Quartet with Anton Nel
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date October 19, 2012
The Chamber Orchestra Kremlin under its music director, Misha Rachlevsky, returned to town on Oct. 14 with the pianist James Dick, a beloved figure in San Antonio but too seldom seen here in recent years.
Their Temple Beth-El concert, this troupe’s fourth for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, had Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto at its center. The Moscow-based string players held forth in works by Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Brahms
Autumnal Beethoven, springy Brahms
Author: Ursula Pari, Anchor publish date October 15, 2012
SAN ANTONIO – Hundreds of high school students who have never heard a live classical chamber orchestra got a chance to experience one of the most famed ensembles to ever grace a stage when the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin played at Brackenridge High School Auditorium Monday morning.
The 17-piece string ensemble is on a Texas tour and only will stop at one other school in the state.
The San Antonio Chamber Music Society, which has been in existence for 70 years, made the arrangements for Misha Rachlevsky’s ensemble to make two stops in the city.
Russian string ensemble performs at Brackenridge HS
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date April 3, 2012
The lush, perfumed chromaticism of Arnold Schönberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” is well known to concert audiences in its original 1902 scoring for string sextet and in the composer’s later arrangement for string orchestra. This expressionist, protomodern landmark appeared in a third guise as the centerpiece of a concert by the excellent Vienna Piano Trio, April 1 in First Unitarian-Universalist Church. The San Antonio Chamber Music Society sponsored the local tour stop.
A walk in the moonlight, with a lighter step
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 6, 2012
A product of culture is never just an artifact, a thing. It is also a repository of the ideas, beliefs, practices, aspirations, limitations — the list goes on — of its historical context. Too, the way a cultural product is experienced is one of its essential qualities, and experience is unavoidably fluid, like the river you can’t step into twice.
Over the past few decades, musicians aligned with the “historically informed performance” movement have come reasonably close to reproducing the style and sonic character of music from the baroque period — the artifacts as they sounded at birth, to the extent that research has been able to illuminate.
An authentically freewheeling blast
2011
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date April 6, 2011
Why do some musical works last while others fade? There are lots of reasons, of course, but one doesn’t get enough notice: Some pieces are just more fun to play than others, and most musicians prefer fun over tedium. And if the music is fun to play, there’s a good chance it also will be rewarding to hear.
The members of the Vancouver-based Lafayette String Quartet seemed to be having a ball with Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 2 (1958-59), the centerpiece of a San Antonio Chamber Music Society concert that opened with Samuel Barber’s Quartet in B and closed with P.I. Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No. 3 in E-flat. Temple Beth-El was the venue for the April 3 concert.
A compelling conversation, set in motion by Elliott Carter
By Cary Clack – San Antonio Express-News publish date April 5, 2011
Sitting in Sul Ross Middle School’s library Friday morning and gently caressing his violin, Rico Rodriguez was excited yet, he admitted, “A little nervous.” But by the time Yo-Yo Ma, the world-famous cellist, began stomping around the library like a monster and pretending that he was from Mars, Rodriguez and the rest of his school’s orchestra were at ease.
Yo-Yo Ma encourages students to express themselves
By David Hendricks – San Antonio Express-News publish date April 1, 2011
The audience attending the Silk Road Ensemble concert Thursday night might never again see musicians having so much fun together on stage. Famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma led the party, and the sellout crowd eagerly joined in by clapping along during the magical tour of culturally blended musical expression.
Overnight: Yo-Yo Ma
By Mike Greenberg – Incident Light publish date March 8, 2011
The Ysaÿe Quartet of France brought some of the plushest string-quartet playing we’ve heard in years to a program of first-class works by Mozart, Fauré and Brahms, March 6 in Temple Beth-El for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society.