Ketchikan trumpeter to headline Con Brio Chamber Series recital
- Ellie Ruel
- Feb 26
- 3 min read
Variety of classical genres and co-players set for Saturday performance at Alaska State Museum
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
The Con Brio Chamber Series will bring a classical trumpet recital to the Alaska State Museum this weekend, starring Ketchikan-based trumpeter Jeff Karlson and piano accompaniment by Sue Kazama.
“My deepest love for music is chamber music. I like the intimate setting, the challenges it offers, in terms of you're playing in a semi-solo or solo format, and you're really kind of put out there, but it's also very intimate as well,” said Sally Schlichting, artistic director of the Con Brio Series.
She started Con Brio Chamber Series 10 years ago, and has been putting together about four chamber music concerts a year in Juneau since. Schlichting said the pay-as-you-can events are usually popular and provide a more intimate alternative to larger symphonic events. She’s been principal flutist with the Juneau Symphony for about a decade.
“There's a real passion in the audience in Juneau for chamber music, and the concerts are always really well attended,” she said.
For Karlson, who’s performing in the series for the first time and said he hasn’t done a traditional recital since graduate school, it’s a chance to step outside his musical comfort zone. Since Ketchikan is a smaller community with fewer brass players, he has the opportunity to perform with a full quintet. With this series, Karlson is free to design a program of pieces he's passionate about, unlike in graduate school.
“The thing about doing a recital in grad school is you're a little bit beholden to the check boxes of your instructors and your teachers in the program of what to play,” Karlson said. “When Sally reached out to me, I thought to myself, ‘This is gonna be so fun, because now I get to create a program for me, right?’ Something that I'm really passionate about, music that I love to play, and also music that I think an audience is really going to connect with.”
The program is set to combine a few different genres including flamenco and romantic German in hopes of appealing to a variety of tastes. Karlson will perform works by Theo Charlier, Gustav Mahler, and Manuel De Falla, finishing off with a brass quintet piece by Victor Ewald. The pieces by De Falla and Mahler will feature piano accompaniment, and Charlier’s “Transcendent Etude No. 4 ‘Du Style’” will be a solo.
Both Schlichting and Karlson agreed their favorite part of the upcoming performance is the Mahler song cycle, which is usually performed with dramatic brass in an orchestral setting.
“The thing about Mahler, he just infuses his music with such emotional depth and weight, and that can be overwhelming sometimes, especially if you just sit down and hear a Mahler symphony. They last for more than an hour, almost all of them; there’s a lot there,” Karlson explained. “To embody Mahler through the trumpet in the vocal kind of a sense, in the lyrical sense that Mueller is really good at writing for, I'm just thrilled to execute that.”
The venue is also exciting to Schlichting, since she said the acoustics are perfect for brass performances.
“One of the things that I am really excited about is just the opportunity to put on a brass program in the Alaska State Museum, because I've only done it once before, and it was fantastic,” she said. “The audience was just blown away. This is the sonorities of brass in that hall, it's just acoustically so well suited for brass music, and it doesn't overwhelm — it's warm, and it's just really stunning.”
Traveling to Juneau for the concert has provided some geographical challenges with rehearsals. Karlson is also the principal trumpet for the Juneau Symphony, and describes Juneau as a “home away from home” in Alaska.
“Typically, this sort of endeavor, I would want to be getting together quite often to hone the music and hone our parts,” he said. “It's been fun because it's added a lot more musical activity for me in the four days that I'm in Juneau for Symphony concerts.”
He scheduled Con Brio Chamber Series rehearsals around his Symphony performances, giving him a chance to practice with Sue Kazama and the brass quintet. Other members of the quintet include trumpeter Rick Trostel, French horn player Taylor Young, trombone player Jared Lear, and tuba player Alan Young.
Karlson said he is looking forward to trying out a new performance style.
“I'm very excited to share my playing through a medium that I don't get to do, either in Ketchikan or up until now in Juneau,” he said.
The performance is scheduled at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Alaska State Museum Atrium. Admission is pay-as-you-can.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
