American Quintets Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective

• Amy Beach (1867 - 1944): Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 67:
• 1 Beach: Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 67: I. Adagio 09:59
• 2 Beach: Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 67: II. Adagio espressivo 08:51
• 3 Beach: Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 67: III. Allegro agitato 09:33
• Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981):
• 4 Barber: Dover Beach, Op. 3 07:25
• Florence Price (1887 - 1953): Piano Quintet in A Minor:
• 5 Price: Piano Quintet in A Minor: I. Allegro non troppo 13:28
• 6 Price: Piano Quintet in A Minor: II. Andante con moto 07:38
• 7 Price: Piano Quintet in A Minor: III. Juba. Allegro 03:50
• 8 Price: Piano Quintet in A Minor: IV. Scherzo. Allegro 02:35
• Total Runtime 01:03:19

Info for American Quintets

Hailed by The Times for its ‘exhilarating performances’, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was dreamed up in 2017 by Tom Poster and Elena Urioste, who met through the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme. The Collective operates with a flexible roster which features many of today’s most inspirational musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, and its creative programming is marked by an ardent commitment to celebrating diversity of all forms and a desire to unearth lesser-known gems of the repertoire. This ethos is clear in their repertoire selection for this their début recording.

The Piano Quintet is one of Amy Beach’s better-known works, which the KCC collectively fell in love with during a residency at the Cheltenham festival. Composed in 1907, the work reflects the strong influence of the music of Brahms.

Florence Price famously claimied to face ‘two handicaps – those of sex and race’, and much of her music remained unpublished at the time of her death. Additionally, a significant quantity of her manuscripts had disappeared without trace. It was not until 2009 that a cache of them (including two lost symphonies) was discovered by property developers in the attic of an abandoned house in Illinois – including the score for the Piano Quintet in A minor that receives its world première recording here. Although characteristically conservative in its late-romantic idiom, the piece celebrates Price’s African American heritage with echoes of spirituals and hymns, and the popular juba stomping dance rooted in the slave plantations of the Deep South.

Between these two piano quintets sits Samuel Barber’s early Dover Beach, a setting of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem that has remained one of the best-known works in the voice-and-quartet repertoire.

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
is a flexible ensemble of wonderful, joyful, kind, passionate musicians who can’t wait to share chamber music with you.

Like many musicians, we spend a lot of time worrying about the world - about inequality, prejudice, violence, bullying, divisive rhetoric. Chamber music has an extraordinary power to bring people together: it unites musicians as equals, and draws listeners in to its intimate, transportive world.

We love to devise creative and innovative programmes, to curate multi-concert series and residencies, and to showcase great music both familiar and lesser-known. Our diverse and brilliant team hopes also to be able to inspire and educate audiences of all generations in the joys of chamber music, and ultimately to bring a bit of happiness and unity to our currently rather fractured-seeming world.

Karim Sulayman
Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, praised for his “lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma” (BBC Music Magazine). The 2019 Best Classical Solo Vocal GRAMMY® Award winner, he continues to earn acclaim for his original and innovative programming and recording projects, while regularly performing on the world’s stages in opera, orchestral concerts, recital and chamber music.

Recently Mr. Sulayman was presented by Carnegie Hall for a sold out solo recital debut followed immediately by the world premiere of his own multidisciplinary production, Unholy Wars, a baroque pasticcio centered around the Crusades and the Middle East, at Spoleto Festival USA. He’s also made recent debuts at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Stockholm’s Drottningholms Slottsteater, Houston Grand Opera, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and the Chicago, National and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras. He debuted at Wigmore Hall in concerts of French chamber music with his frequent collaborators, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, which The Arts Desk named to its “Best Performances of 2022.”

Last season saw performances of his acclaimed program with guitarist Sean Shibe, Broken Branches, at Ravinia Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, CAP-UCLA, Boston Celebrity Series and the Phillips Collection, and debuts at Opera Philadelphia (Unholy Wars) and New World Symphony (Britten’s Nocturne). He made his role debut as Grimoaldo in Handel’s Rodelinda (Hudson Hall), created the role of Crow in the world premiere of Layale Chaker/Lisa Schlesinger’s Ruinous Gods (Spoleto Festival USA), and debuted at the Royal Opera House, reprising the title role of Sarah Angliss/Ross Sutherland’s Giant, a role he created the previous year for the Aldeburgh Festival. This season and future engagements include the protagonist in the world premiere of David T. Little’s highly anticipated monodrama What Belongs to You (based on Garth Greenwell’s acclaimed novel), written for Sulayman and Alarm Will Sound and directed by Mark Morris, his role debut as Pelléas in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a reprisal of his celebrated portrayal of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and concerts at Park Avenue Armory, Wigmore Hall and Hong Kong’s Premiere Performances.

A dedicated chamber musician, Sulayman was a frequent participant at the Marlboro Music Festival in collaboration with co-directors and pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode.. He has since been presented by many of the world’s leading chamber music festivals, collaborating frequently with groups like Eighth Blackbird and as a core member of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. His concerts and recordings have been broadcast nationally and internationally on NPR, American Public Media, BBC Radio 3 and WDR 3.

Mr. Sulayman’s thought provoking and innovative programming is highlighted in his growing discography. He won the 2019 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for his debut solo album, Songs of Orpheus (Avie Records), his original program of early Italian Baroque songs and arias. His second solo album, Where Only Stars Can Hear Us (Avie Records), an album of Schubert Lieder with fortepianist Yi-heng Yang was released in 2020 and debuted at #1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart and has received widespread critical acclaim, including being named as “Critic’s Choice” by Opera News, and included on the New York Times’ “Best Classical Music of 2020.” His third album, Broken Branches (Pentatone) with Sean Shibe, debuted at #1 on the UK Classical Chart, and was named one of the Best Classical Music Albums of 2023 by the New York Times, Editor’s Choice by Gramophone Magazine, and was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal album.

In November 2016, Karim created a social experiment/performance art piece called I Trust You, designed to build bridges in a divided political climate. A video version of this experiment went “viral” on the internet, and was honored as a prize winner in the My Hero Film Festival. He has been invited to give talks and hold open forums with student and adult groups about inclusion, empathy, healing from racism, and activism through the arts.

In other visual media, he is featured in the ARTE documentary Leonard Bernstein – A Genius Divided, which premiered throughout Europe in the summer of 2018 and was subsequently released on DVD. His performance of Bernstein’s Mass with the CSO was broadcast on PBS Great Performances in the spring of 2020, and in the fall of 2020 Karim appeared on the second season of the acclaimed series Dickinson on Apple TV+.

A native of Chicago, Karim’s musical education began with violin studies at age 3 which he continued through high school. He also spent years as a boy alto the Chicago Children’s Choir and was hand selected by Sir Georg Solti and Leonard Slatkin as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony. He graduated with highest honors from the Eastman School of Music where he worked in the Collegium Musicum under the tutelage of Paul O’Dette, and earned a Masters degree from Rice University. He later moved to Paris, France where he studied with renowned tenor/haute-contre, Howard Crook. He also studied improvisation at the Second City Training Center in Chicago.

Karim is passionate about his place in the Arts industry as someone who challenges audiences to think outside the box in a quest to maintain classical music’s relevance in a modern world, smashing the practice of treating old works as museum pieces. He enjoys educating the next generation of music students, encouraging them to think in this way while helping them cultivate their own unique voices. He hopes to make positive changes through thoughtful performance, arts advocacy and social justice that will impact generations to come.

Booklet for American Quintets