Joyce and David Cornell were used to big-time chamber music, the kind you rarely see outside of New York City or Chicago.
But when the Tucson winter visitors and New York retirees — he was a former opera singer, she was a money manager on Wall Street — discovered the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival during an early visit about a decade ago, “we had our socks knocked off,” Joyce Cornell said.
“For me, that was clincher” in the decision to move here full-time in 2009, she said. “Good music is important for us.”
The couple became season subscribers to the festival’s parent, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. In 2010 they became enamored with composer Lowell Liebermann after hearing the young Korean pianist Joyce Yang perform his piece “Gargoyles” in a Friends concert.
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“We were thinking of doing a commission and we heard this piece and it was just , wow! We thought a little more about it and took the plunge,” Cornell said.
The couple commissioned Liebermann to compose Trio No. 3 in G minor, premiered by Trio Solisti in January 2013. It was the Friends’ 50th commissioned work, all funded by audience members like the Cornells.
On Sunday, Liebermann will be back in Tucson for the 22nd annual Friends Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival to hear violist Paul Neubauer, clarinetist Bil Jackson and pianist Bernadene Blaha premiere his Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola commissioned by the Cornells. It is one of two commissions premiering during the festival; the other, Jiri Gemrot’s String Quartet No. 2, got its world premiere Wednesday by festival headliners the Prazák Quartet.
Cornell would not say how much she and her husband paid Liebermann, but she said it was reasonable in the realm of chamber music commissions.
“I got a bee in my bonnet for the second one and I wanted (to focus on) the instruments that get overlooked,” Cornell said of the unusual combination of musical voices she and her husband wanted Liebermann to explore in the piece. “I’ve always taken pity on violists. It’s not fair, but there’s a whole raft of viola jokes that they’re the middle part.”
Liebermann has sent the couple the score and Cornell said she is confident the work will have life beyond Sunday’s premiere.
“I went through it poking notes on the piano and getting a little sense of it. … There are some wonderful lyrical lines,” she said.
The festival started last Sunday and concludes Sunday.
Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com or 573-4642. On Twitter: @Starburch.
Cathalena E. Burch
Reporter
