LINDSAY DEUTSCH
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT – Santa Rosa, CA
July 3, 2005

INTIMATE SUMMER

4 SERIES OF CHAMBER MUSIC CONCERTS PROMISE
HOURS OF ENJOYMENT IN RELATIVELY SMALL SETTINGS

By GEORGE LAUER

The classic summer concert, a smaller, more intimate affair than its symphonic cousins in the fall and winter, offers audiences and performers a chance to get up close and personal with each other.
Starting this week, North Bay audiences have dozens of opportunities to get acquainted with a wide range of performers in four series of summer chamber music concerts -- the Green Music Festival at Sonoma State University, the Mendocino Music Festival in a big white tent on the Mendocino Headlands, the Midsummer Mozart Festival at several Bay Area locations and the Napa Valley Summer Chamber Music Festival, also at several venues.

Lindsay Deutsch, a young violinist from Los Angeles whom critics have described as ``phenomenally gifted,'' makes her Bay Area debut Friday in the first of four Green Music Festival Chamber concerts in SSU's Evert B. Person Theatre.
``I like smaller, indoor venues,'' Deutsch said by phone from her Southern California home. ``You feel closer to your audience when you're on a smaller stage. You're not just a speck in the distance for people in the last row.
``I think chamber music settings are more musical. There's more of a give-and-take feeling between performers and the audience,'' she said.

Deutsch, 20, will play five pieces -- works by Golijov, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Kodaly and Dvorak -- during the six-day series. Deutsch, recipient of several awards and rave reviews for concerts throughout the United States and Canada, is especially looking forward to working with Green Music  Festival Artistic Director Jeffrey Kahane.

“I like smaller, indoor venues. You feel closer to your audience when you’re on a smaller stage. You’re not just a speck in the distance for people in the last row” Lindsay Deutsch

``I was in Toronto when he was conducting there last year and I was just floored by what he did. Boy, what an artist,'' Deutsch said. ``I met him later in Los Angeles and I told him I thought what he did in Toronto was the most amazing thing and he said he had a temperature of 105 with the flu for that performance. ``So I was even more impressed,'' Deutsch said with a laugh. The admiration is mutual. ``I was in Los Angeles conducting a student orchestra and this young person walks up to me and asks `Would it be possible to play for you?''' Kahane recalled. ``I get requests like this all the time everywhere I go, literally hundreds over the course of a year. I said `Sure, show me your stuff.' She walked out and played for about one minute and my jaw just dropped. I was so impressed. I think Green Festival audiences will love her.'' Deutsch, who played the ``Red Violin Concerto'' by John Corigliano for her informal audition with Kahane, is also an accomplished racquetball player. She won the gold medal in the World Junior Olympic Racquetball Championships in 1997 and was selected to the 2000 U.S. Jr. Olympic Racquetball Team.

Deutsch is also looking forward to playing Prokofiev's ``Sonata for Two Violins'' with Korean violinist Chee-Yun, who has played at the Green Festival before. Making her Green Festival debut this year is violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, who has played with the Santa Rosa Symphony twice. The festival also features performances by cellists Alisa Weilerstein and Peter Wyrick, violist Aloysia Friedmann and pianist Jon Kimura Parker.