In Saturday’s (6/12) New York Times, James R. Oestreich reports from Rockport, Massachusetts, “New England teems with modest chamber music festivals each summer, and from a distance many look attractive if not always immediately distinguishable. The Rockport Chamber Music Festival in this town 40 miles north of Boston (not to be confused with, say, the Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport and Rockland, Me.) has just set itself apart from the crowd with a striking new home, the Shalin Liu Performance Center, which the festival inaugurated on Thursday evening to open its 29th season. The center was designed by Epstein Joslin Architects of Cambridge, Mass., and Kirkegaard Associates, the acousticians from Chicago, whose principals Alan Joslin and Lawrence Kirkegaard were involved in a major triumph at the other end of Massachusetts in 1994, the construction of Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. The smaller-scale Shalin Liu center consists mainly of an intimate 330-seat concert hall, beautiful to the eye as well as to the ear. … What Mr. Kirkegaard wanted, he said in a film shown before the concert, was ‘a sparkly, clean window to the sound,’ and he has achieved it.”
Posted June 15, 2010
