Capital City Concerts Kicks Off Season With a Benefit for Flood Relief 

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• File: Caleb Kenna
• Karen Kevra

Capital City Concerts, the Montpelier chamber series that flutist Karen Kevra has curated for the past 24 years, cemented the lineup for its 2023-24 season before the July floods submerged the city. Pianist Jeffrey Chappell was slated to give the first concert as a soloist. When he saw the images from his home in San Jose, Calif., he was stunned.

"I've been playing on that series since its first year, so I just feel such a strong connection with the city, and I have a lot of very close, old friends there," the pianist said by phone. "I was in shock. I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

Chappell suggested to Kevra that she donate his concert fee to flood relief, and soon the artistic director decided to donate all proceeds from the concert.

Finding a venue presented a challenge, because Capital City Concerts' performance space, the 1865 Unitarian Church of Montpelier, was among the flooded sites and would take months to clean and restore. But the Barre Opera House was available and seats 650, almost three times as many as the church. Its new executive director, Kurt Thoma, offered it for the same rental price.

"As horrible as this flood has been, the degree to which people have shown an incredible generosity of spirit has bowled me over," Kevra said by phone from her home in Cornwall, which has also seen a sodden summer.

The benefit concert takes place on Friday, September 8. Tickets are "pay what you can," and the proceeds will go to two organizations helping small businesses recover: Montpelier Strong Recovery Fund, a partnership of Montpelier Alive and the Montpelier Foundation; and the Vermont Main Street Flood Recovery Fund, set up by Barre's Capstone Community Action. People who can't make it to the concert are encouraged to donate directly to the organizations.

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• Jeffrey Chappell

Chappell, 70, who quipped that "my mother played Chopin and my father played boogie-woogie," taught at Goucher College in Baltimore for more than 40 years as a piano faculty member and the director of jazz studies. In Montpelier, he will play the program he planned before the flooding. Fortunately, it includes no French impressionists, he noted ruefully, given that compositions by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and others are often about water.

Instead, the concert opens with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Fantasy and Fugue in C Major. Chappell has been playing the piece since he was a 10-year-old growing up in St. Louis. The unrestricted form of the fantasy, he said, makes the piece "sound like Mozart just sat down in his off-hours and let his imagination run wild."

He'll also play Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109, a work that he studied at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Rudolf Serkin, a cofounder of the Marlboro Music Festival.

Also a jazz-influenced composer, Chappell will perform his "Piano Trio" — a piece that is not, as its punning title might seem to suggest, for piano, violin and cello but for solo piano, softly played (the meaning of "piano") in three parts.

Chappell's program includes Frédéric Chopin's Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante, and it concludes with one of Kevra's favorite showstoppers, Samuel Barber's Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor.

Composed in 1949, the Barber piece is "perhaps the best modern piano sonata ever written, and no one plays it as well as Jeff," Kevra averred by phone. "This will be the third time we've done it in 24 years, and it brings the house down every time."

Chappell and Kevra met in 2000 at a millennial concert organized by then-Montpelier pianist Michael Arnowitt, who assigned the pair Antonio Vivaldi's "Goldfinch" concerto. When the two began playing together at Capital City Concerts, they rehearsed each piece in front of Kevra's mentor — flutist Louis Moyse, another cofounder of Marlboro.

The homes of neither Kevra's nor Chappell's Montpelier friends were devastated by the floods, but Kevra, who lived in the Capital City for 23 years before moving to Cornwall, mourned the impact on the city's commerce.

"So many businesses have been generous year after year with sponsorships and business listings in the program," she said, citing in particular Capitol Copy, one of the series' most stalwart supporters and the source of all its printed matter.

"They are not coming back," Kevra said — sad news that owner Glenn Sturgis confirmed in an email to Seven Days.