The audience was small Friday afternoon, but that didn’t stop about 10 musicians from Fort Hays State University and the Hays Symphony Orchestra from offering a sample of what can be heard this week in the Cottonwood International Festival at FHSU.
“We play the repertoire for smaller ensembles like the symphony orchestra or salon music,” said Shah Sadikov, HSO music director.
Launched in 2000, the Cottonwood Festival brings internationally known musicians to celebrate chamber music. It begins Wednesday and culminates with concerts on Saturday. All events, including the masterclasses and rehearsals, are open to the public with no admission charge.
While the festival will feature music from the Post-Romantic Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Friday’s sinfonietta outreach performance at Hays Public Library included soloists performing works by Bach and Mozart.
Cellist Megan Rayl opened the concert with Bach’s Prelude from Suite No. 4 while Clara Kachanes and Natalee Thomas performed prices from Mozart’s violin concertos.
The entire group — five violinists and five cellists — then performed Grieg Holberg Suite and Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, which will also be performed in the festival’s final concert.
The festival brings the guest performers and FHSU faculty together for performances and master classes for students. For the first time this year, high school students will be included.
“We want to bring the internationally known artists to Hays to work with us, to give our community something amazing and work with our students,” Sadikov said.
Guest musicians include:
• Violinist Evgeny Zvonnokov, associate concertmaster for the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and Concertmaster for Wichita Grand Opera. He received his music degree from St. Petersburg Sate Conservatory in Russia and has performed and taught masterclasses across the country and in southeast Asia.
• Rudolf Haken, composer and viola professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. He is also director of the University of Illinois Hip Hop Collective. He’s brought heavy metal influence to his music, performing transcriptions of Van Halen and Metallica on an electric viola.
• Sunnat Ibragimov, who is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Southern California. A cellist, he was 10 when he won the 1997 Youth Competition in the Republic of Uzbekistan and has won several other competitions around the world.
• Veronique Mathieu, assistant professor of violin at the University of Kansas. The Canadian violinist has performed in Europe, South Africa, and North and South America. She is artist in residence at the International Music festival of Piracicaba in Brazil, and has been invited to perform and teach master classes in Costa Rica.
They will be joined by Sadikov, who is also assistant professor of upper strings and orchestra director at FHSU, Benjamin Cline, chairman of the FHSU department of music and theatre, and Irena Ravitskaya, associate professor of music at FHSU.
In the final concert, the string sextet will perform Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht,” or “Transfigured Night,” which he composed after a German poem that tells the story of a couple walking through a forest and the woman confesses she became pregnant with another man. Sadikov called it “a very moving and emotionally expressive piece of composition.”
Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, which opens the final concert, is, Sadikov said, “very romantic and very beautiful with lush melodies.” Elgar’s Piano Quintet in C Minor will close the concert.