By Jim Lowe
Staff Writer
When Randolph’s Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival was forced to cancel its August concerts as consequence of COVID-19, it thought it had an ace up its sleeve. The Cassotto Duo — pianist and accordionist Annemieke and Jeremiah McLane — was scheduled to perform in the festival Aug. 21. The two are married, live in Vermont and Chandler Music Hall could easily be reconfigured to meet state coronavirus regulations. This one concert could go on.
But on Aug. 4, the McLane’s Sharon home burned to the ground.
“You cannot see things anymore,” Annemieke said. “You see the piano frame, you see little pieces of sheet music scattered around everywhere with everything at ground level. It’s a mystery — we don’t know how it started.”
Annemieke, Jeremiah and their 7-year-old son Luke were on vacation in Maine when the fire occurred.
“Jeremiah’s sister called us,” Annemieke said. “The neighbors saw it first and called the fire department. We were gone for a week, so it’s not something that we could have done anything about.
“The cool thing is, we had the program with us because we were practicing in Maine,” she said. “Jeremiah had taken one accordion and we had the keyboard with us, so we have the music.
“I think it will be good for us to play just for our heart,” she said, adding, “I think for people it is so important hear live music.
The Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival will present the Cassotto Duo live at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 21 at Chandler Music Hall. The hour-long program, featuring music of Couperin, J.S. Bach, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Dvorak, Piazzola, Jo Privat and Jeremiah McLane, will also be live-streamed.
Festival founder and Artistic Director Peter Sanders, who remains at his New Jersey home, will address the audience in a video statement.
“I feel awful that I can’t be there,” Sanders said. “I will miss it dearly, being up there playing with my friends and colleagues, seeing my wonderful audience. The goal is, we will do this concert series, assuming we’re not suffering through this much longer, in 2021. The season dates are set.”
Chandler Music Hall will be open for 75 audience members adhering to Vermont COVID-19 Guidelines. All will need to attest to being symptom-free upon arrival, and will need to remain masked for the duration of the concert and while entering, exiting the building or using the restrooms.
Chandler is using enhancing cleaning protocols during COVID, which include daily deep cleaning, hand-sanitizing stations and staff temperature checks. The concert will be approximately 60 minutes and performed with no intermission. Because of the pandemic, the traditional post-concert reception will not be held.
This husband and wife duo, well known in central Vermont and the Upper Valley, performs from coast to coast in the United States and in Europe. Annemieke Spoelstra McLane was born and educated in the Netherlands where she began her career as a concert pianist. Since coming to Vermont she has taught for 11 years at Saint Michael’s College and performed throughout the region.
One of Vermont’s foremost traditional musicians, Jeremiah McLane is a composer, accordionist, pianist, singer and educator with a diverse musical background, including blues, jazz, Celtic, Quebecois, French and other roots-influenced music. He is the founder and director of the Floating Bridge Music School, and has served on the faculties of the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, the Summit School for Traditional Music in Montpelier and at the Upper Valley Music Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
The Cossotto Duo makes its own arrangements for piano and accordion that highlight the folk elements in classical compositions. Their music ranges from the 16th to the 21st centuries.
“It’s nice to play on a real piano in a nice hall, because the blend of the accordion and the piano we think is spectacular,” Annemieke said. “What we do when we arrange is try to match the colors. Sometimes when we play in unison, it’s hard to tell who is who.
“I think the wind of the accordion, like the organ, sounds warm,” she said. “The matching of the colors is what is fascinating.”
In fact, one of the major works on the program is J.S. Bach’s Trio Sonata No. 3 in D minor, BWV 527 for organ.
“There is a duo in Europe we heard doing one of the trio sonatas, a German accordionist and Italian harpsichordist,” Jeremiah said. “It was a wonderful duo. They may have been the first accordion and (keyboard) duo to do that, and I believe we may be the second.”
The organ trio sonatas have been performed in many different arrangements, including by traditional mandolinist Chris Thiele and bassist Edgar Meyer.
“They’re amazingly beautiful pieces of music,” Jeremiah said. “It works really well for us because we can use the four voices of the two instruments in different ways.”
For Jeremiah, playing classical music on accordion was something new.
“My background is not the same as Annemieke,” Jeremiah said. “For example, in the Bach, some of the detail work, we have to go to her training.”
But classical accordion is unusual only to American ears.
“When I studied piano, in the piano department, there were also classes for the classical accordion,” Annemieke said. “In the conservatory, keyboards were organ, accordion, piano.”
“We try to learn from each other, which is a good thing,” she said.
Jeremiah found middle ground musically with one of the first pieces they played together, the “Suite française” by 20th century French composer Francis Poulenc.
“There’s a lot of music in there that I recognized from my traditional playing of French music,” Jeremiah said. “There are classical composers who borrow so heavily from traditional music.”
Their arrangement of Edvard Grieg’s familiar “Holberg Suite,” Op. 40 is certainly unique to them.
“We decided that the first movement sounds so great on solo piano,” Annemieke said. “And in the next movement we add the accordion very simply by playing each of the voices on each of the repeats. The third movement is very different, and the last movement the accordion becomes more improvisational. So in each movement we use different effects.”
The program also includes Astor Piazzola’s famous “Oblivion” and Jeremiah’s own “Luke Suite.”
“Some of it was influenced by a French composer who was a bagpiper in the court of Louis XIV,” Jeremiah said.
Despite the devastating fire, the two are determined to go on with the concert.
“It’s such a healing thing to play music,” Jeremiah said. “There’s no question for us that we want to do it.”
“And, of course, to support Peter and the festival,” Annemieke said. “We want to make sure the festival keeps going.”
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