Celebrated clarinetist Peter Shackleton will join INNERchamber Orchestra for his sixth and final online concert of the season, Souvenirs, on June 20 starting at 7 p.m.

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For their sixth and final online concert of the season, the INNERchamber String Quartet joins acclaimed Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra clarinetist Peter Shackleton to explore the music of acclaimed American composer Bernard Herrmann and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Dubbed Souvenirs, the concert will feature Herrmann’s Travel Memories for quintet with clarinet, a musical movement the composer wrote after moving to Italy following a falling out with longtime collaborator Alfred Hitchcock.

“Bernard Herrmann is less well known as a concert composer and better known for his cinematographic works,” said Andrew Chung, artistic director of the INNERchamber Orchestra. “He’s had this long partnership with Alfred Hitchcock… so his sound is the sound behind Vertigo and North By Northwest – the famous Hitchcock films – and of course Psycho where the strings just tingle the spine.

”… This play is from the end of his career, and he moved from Hollywood to the Italian countryside. … In this music, I hear Puccini’s operas and I hear Rossini and it’s pretty awesome. And for that job we have a clarinetist, Peter Shackleton, who is one of our main members, and it’s just great to find Peter on a piece that he, over the course of his long, long career, has never seen before. ‘ve never played before.

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Chung paired Herrmann’s music with the second from “Razumovsky” Op. quartets, a piece commissioned by the Russian Ambassador in Vienna and written during the middle period of the 19th century composer.

“At this point we have a very, very confident Beethoven, armed with all the inventiveness and ingenuity, and he’s venturing into new ground,” said Chung, who also plays the violin in the orchestra string quartet. “It enlarges the string quartet and imbues it with even more meaning and depth.

“It’s a job we’ve never played before, but of course we’ve been well aware of it our entire lives, so we’re pretty excited about it.”

As they have been doing for most of their 11th season playing together, the musicians at INNERchamber will be recording this final Revival House concert in Stratford, and it will air online from 7 p.m. on June 20 with a discussion before -concert starting at 6.30 p.m. afternoon

For more information, to purchase tickets, and to order a take-out meal at Revival House for the night of the concert (before June 18), visit www.innerchamber.ca/souvenirs.

Looking back on last season, which posed many pandemic-related challenges for the orchestra to overcome, Chung said he was delighted with all that INNERchamber has accomplished. These accomplishments include new partnerships with Revival House and local videographer Michael Fisher, the latter of which gave the band the chance to live-stream their concerts in the future.

“Even if the pandemic restrictions can be relaxed – fingers crossed – we will still continue the livestream next year based on what we have learned this year,” Chung said. “So it wasn’t all bad. It has been difficult at times, but we have a great Board of Directors who have been very willing to tackle challenges head on.

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