KAMEI’S HOMAGE TO MENTORS

“It’s all about friendship and reunion,” says violinist Yukiko Kamei, founder of the Sitka/L.A. Festival of Chamber Music, which opens Thursday night in Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo.

The festival is also about homage, the homage Kamei and her associates want to pay to their teachers, the late cellist, Gregor Piatigorsky, who died 10 years ago this summer, and the legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz, who turned 85 in February.

Kamei--who studied with Heifetz in his master classes at USC, beginning in the 1960s--was one of the founders of the Sitka Summer Music Festival in Alaska in 1972. Among her cohorts in that venture were such other Heifetz and Piatigorsky proteges as violinist Paul Rosenthal, cellist Nathaniel Rosen and pianist Doris Stevenson.

Rosen, Rosenthal and Stevenson, and other Sitka veterans--violinist Christiaan Bor, violist Milton Thomas and cellist Jeffrey Solow, among others--are on the roster for these four Los Angeles concerts, scheduled Thursday night and Sunday afternoon and May 22 and 25.

Two premieres will add interest to programs otherwise offering chamber-music staples by Haydn, Schumann, Ravel, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Mendelssohn, Kamei said.

Paul Chihara’s “Ceremony,” in its expanded, two-movement version for two cellos, oboe, string bass and percussion, will be given a Los Angeles premiere Thursday night, when the two cellists for whom it was written, Jeffrey Solow and Nathaniel Rosen, play it together for the first time.

And Henri Lazarof’s Serenade for string sextet (1985) will receive its world premiere on the closing day of the festival, May 25 at 2 p.m.

“Lazarof was inspired to write the sextet after hearing some of us play together at the Amsterdam Chamber Music Festival in Holland. That is the festival started by Christiaan Bor,” Kamei said.

In addition to the Chihara work, the opening-night program also lists Haydn’s String Quartet in G, Opus 3, No. 3, as played by violinists Kamei and Ik-Hwan Bae, violist Thomas and cellist Solow; Charles Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies, played by oboist Allan Vogel, violist Thomas and pianist Stevenson, and Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Opus 44, with Stevenson, Bae, Kamei, Thomas and Rosen.

The programming, said Rick Goodfellow, administrator of the Alaskan series that spawned this one, is similar to that done in Sitka. He added that the camaraderie the Sitka players have developed over the last 14 years has resulted in the founding of similar chamber-music events in places as different as Seattle and Amsterdam, where Sitka alumni have created festivals.

“We’re not trying to re-create the Sitka concerts, which are unique in their setting and ambiance,” said Kamei, who serves as the festival’s artistic director. “We’re just bringing together some of the people from that unique situation. There can be no comparison between the two places. Sitka is a little town of 8,000 people, with its own personality. Los Angeles is the big city.”

But, added consulting director Brian Gormley: “The special nature of L.A. is reflected in the tradition started here in the master classes of Heifetz and Piatigorsky. Their students competed with each other, made music together and are still doing so.”