Fein as Composer-in-Residence for Seven Hills Chamber Music Festival
The News & Advance (Lynchburg, VA - 18 Aug 2022): Chamber Music Festival Brings Unique Annual Concert Series to Lynchburg
Offering a fresh series of concerts featuring chamber music — strings, vocals and wind among the variety of instruments and sounds — Seven Hills Chamber Music Festival ultimately began after a few friends formed a piano quartet in 2017. From there, violist and founder/artistic director of Seven Hills, Dudley Raine, decided to grow.
Composer and musician Evan Fein described Seven Hills’s music festival as “quite varied and quite bold.”
A classical musician and contemporary composer, Fein is a composer in residence with Seven Hills this year, performing some of his own works and playing piano and harpsichord during the concerts. Trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music, then Juliard, Fein’s career began around age six, when he started playing the piano and composing.
“Perhaps audience members think of composers as people who are not only dead, but died a really long time ago. I’m hoping it will be exciting for them to come to these concerts where on every single concert there’s at least one piece by a contemporary, or living, American composer,” Fein said.
With a career that has taken him to Paris, Berlin and to Iceland, as well as New York City and now Lynchburg, Fein said Seven Hills Chamber Music Festival has provided the chance to work with top-notch artists and play in the unique genre that is chamber-style music.
Fein’s featured works in the concert series have included voice and piano pieces, as well as a quartet piece for clarinet and strings. It was the Virginia premiere of these compositions.
“I grew up on classical repertoire and the great romantic piano works. But you can’t play only old works forever. You’ve got to keep writing. This is what keeps the art alive,” Fein said.