Looking ahead at the third season of the Belvedere Series featuring classical music in intimate spaces.
Ingrid Keller’s ambitious Belvedere Series is one of the jewels of the Richmond music scene. The program brings musicians with headlining reputations to play an adventurous mix of chamber works in the kind of intimate settings for which they were written.
Classical music is defined by masterworks played by a small army of musicians in voluminous concert halls. But symphonies, concertos, and operas are only the tip of the genre iceberg. The vast majority of works by major (and modern) composers are for far smaller ensembles. For every orchestral epic there are dozens of solo, duet, trio, quartet, quintet, or other works compact enough to fit players and audience into a reasonably sized room.
For concert pianist Keller, the problem was not just that these smaller pieces were seldom played. “The symphony stage is very different from playing in a room with other people,” she explains. “I have played a lot of gigs at universities, in beautiful recital and concert halls. But sometimes I feel that the academic aura means the people that go to those concerts are not there for the reasons that I want to be making music. Those venues were just not conducive to connecting with an audience, which as musicians, is kind of our job. Chamber music contains composers’ deepest secrets, they pour their hearts out.” The passionate humanity of the pieces was lost in impersonal, formal settings.
Keller and her husband, operatic tenor and Executive Director of Development at VCU School of Medicine Nathan Bick, started experimenting with the house concert concept in the rustic loft in Cincinnati where they lived before moving to Richmond. “We would invite our neighbors and people who knew nothing about music and serve wine and snacks,” Keller says. “It was really fun, but I wanted it to be a little more formal than that.”
After moving to Richmond, with the performing downtime of the pandemic, Keller put her energy into founding a nonprofit to fund the program. “My husband has a lot of arts administrative experience, but I wanted to do this myself,” she says. “In the spring of 2021, during the pandemic, I took an online course with Nicholas Photinos, one of the founders of Eighth Blackbird. I thought of a name and then we ended up buying this restored farmhouse for [the Belvedere Series].”
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