The Crowning Concert of Three Decades

Token Creek Festival closes its 30th season with two masters of the keyboard   One never lacks for opportunities to praise the latest event from co-founders John and Rose Mary Harbison, but even so it should be said up front that when it comes to concluding the 30th season of the Token Creek Chamber Music…

A Belated Birthday Party at Token Creek

TCCMF puts the 80-year old John Harbison squarely in the spotlight   There was a special program last Wednesday (8/28) in the Festival barn, the beloved and intimate venue of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival these past thirty years. It was meant to occur last February, around the time that other Madison events joined…

Token Creek Chamber Music Festival at 30: Time to Tweak One Thing

All-Brahms concert produces a different kind of poignancy It didn’t take long on Sunday afternoon, as an all-Brahms program unfolded in the Festival barn at Token Creek, to realize that this would not be an easy blog to post… Some context, with apologies to those who may already know some of this: I have been…

Harbison and Stucky Headline a Stirring Naxos CD

Fascinating program from conductor David Alan Miller   A recent CD in the “American Classics” series from Naxos offers a compelling combination of works, masterfully played by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, conducted by David Alan Miller. John Harbison headlines the booklet, but the first work on the disc is the earliest, Sun-Treader, by Carl…

Summer Leftovers, One Last Helping: Token Creek #3

Harbisons offer a potent potpourri   Painful to admit (and hard to believe) that the final program of the 29th Token Creek Chamber Music Festival was given four weeks ago…but in a season when I finally made it to all three offerings, I hope my readers will indulge me with a “better late than never”…

Summer Leftovers: Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, Concert #2

Rare sounds (and sighting) of the Kepler Quartet   It seems absurd that someone who has attended only the last eight years of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival would suggest that the concert of August29 was the epitome of what the Festival is at its best—and yet such a case could be made. Festival…

Token Creek Chamber Music Festival: Ripe and Ready for the 29th Time

Opening program of Bach and Primosch is indeed a “harvest”   Any one of the previous incarnations of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival’s end-of-summer celebrations might have been dubbed “Harvest.” As it happens, it is this year, the 29th go-round of great music, pithy insights and the precious camaraderie shared by a hundred or…

Token Creek CMF Dances the Summer Away

The 28th Festival’s final program gives us “Waltz”   John and Rose Mary Harbison opened up their Festival Barn once more last Sunday afternoon, and the closing program of their 28th Token Creek Chamber Music Festival presented varied composers’ treatments of the waltz. By program’s end, the whole was greater than the sum of its…

Token Creek CMF: It Is Necessarily So

A Schubert program inspires anew   Most everyone gets excited about “kickoffs” this time of year—but before footballs fly across the land, a traditional farewell to summer is kicked off in a lovingly adapted barn on a cherished piece of land just south of Highway 19 and adjacent to one edge of Token Creek County…

Token Creek Restored—and at Flood Stage, Musically Speaking

27th season of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival overflows (artistically) in opening concert One of Madison’s sweetest farewells to summer always occurs at the Festival Barn, the former residence of Rose Mary Harbison’s family dating back to the 1930s. During that decade the ecological gem known as Token Creek was ruined by short-sighted commercial…