Celebrating 30 Years of Chamber Music at the Clark

Published: November 2, 2024

In 2024-25 the Center for 17th-and-18th-Century Studies and Clark Library celebrate the 30th anniversary of Chamber Music at the Clark, which began in 1994 as a tribute to William Andrews Clark Jr.

The Clark Library’s founder, William Andrews Clark, Jr., was also founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and personally covered all of the orchestra’s expenses from its beginnings in 1919 until his death in 1934. A proficient violinist, Mr. Clark enjoyed music chats so much that he asked his architect to build a room in his new library (1923) in which he could enjoy small concerts. Robert Farquhar obliged by constructing a space that resonated: a spacious drawing room built completely in wood, from the quarter-sawn oak parquet floor to the elaborately carved English oak walls and coffered ceiling. The barrel vault ceiling of the marble-lined vestibule provided a natural echo chamber.

Shortly into his tenure as Director of the Center and the Clark, Peter Reill, also a great aficionado of music, conceived the idea of establishing a permanent chamber music series at the Clark to be held in this drawing room with its magnificent acoustics. He intended the new series both to stand as a tribute to our founder’s achievements and to expand the Clark’s role as a cultural center in the community–as called for in Mr. Clark’s deed of the Library to the University. Peter envisioned bringing to the Clark international and local chamber ensembles of the highest quality to perform concerts for a very modest admission fee.

In 1994, Director Reill obtained a generous pilot grant of $45,000 for the first two years of this undertaking from the Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles. On Sunday, February 5, 1995, the Cherubini String Quartet played the first concert at the Clark in what became known as Chamber Music at the Clark. The spring issue of the Center & Clark Newsletter in 1995 reported “success among the public and … favorable attention from the press. The Library drawing room-admired for both its acoustics and for its beauty was filled to capacity at each of the year’s three programs. ‘As a concert venue, the handsome … Clark Library is for the happy few, but not only the wealthy happy few,’ commented Herbert Glass of the Los Angeles Times.” All three programs were subsequently broadcast in full by KUSC, the radio station of the University of Southern California. KUSC‘s Alan Chapman hosted the concerts, providing commentary on the pieces performed.

By 1996, the pilot grant from the Ahmanson Foundation had underwritten seven concerts. Audiences drawn from both the academic and local communities reacted enthusiastically. That spring Professor Emeritus Henry Bruman offered a $50,000 challenge grant in support of Chamber Music at the Clark. By fall music-lovers and supporters of the Center/Clark programs had responded generously. Over the years artist groups have included quartets such as American String, Artemis, Bartok, Enso, Leipzig, Orpheus, Shanghai, and Ying; trios Boston, Eroica, Jerusalem, Manhattan Piano, and Paris Piano; and duos Finckel and Han, Hadelich and Cheng, Hadelich and Parker, Roge and Lysy. Piano soloists Alan Gampe, Kevin Kenner, Jean-Claude Pennetier augment this partial list. The musicians who played piano all performed on Mr. Clark’s fully restored 1926 Steinway salon grand piano.

Through Peter’s faithful efforts, the Center/Clark was able to offer four, six, then seven and even eight concerts each season. Significant sponsors such as the Ahmanson Foundation, Catherine Benkaim, the Edmund D. Edelman Foundation for Music and the Performing Arts, Mary and Donald Eversoll, Elizabeth and Gunter Herman, and Joyce Perry have helped make this series self-supporting. Chamber Music at the Clark, along with our Bruman Chamber Music Festival, held in the summer at UCLA, establishes the Center/Clark as the most prolific presenter of professional chamber music at UCLA .

-Rogers Brubaker, Artistic Director of the Chamber Music at the Clark, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UCLA