Welcome to the Chamber Society of Israel

Chamber music is the most intimate of musical experiences. For the musicians it is a conversation, an opportunity to communicate in the abstract way only music allows. For the audience it is an opportunity to be brought into this conversation, in a way no other classical music performances can accomplish.

A chamber ensemble is a very complicated thing to assemble. A good balance must be reached between the common and the different. On the one hand, an ensemble with people meeting for the first time might be unable to reach common ground. On the other hand an ensemble of people who grew up together and never left each other's side might have difficulty introducing new ideas to the music making thus keeping it fresh and interesting.

Perhaps the ideal combination would be a group of superb players, who share a common background, come from a common tradition and background, but who have gone their separate ways, and assembled a very different set of experiences and ideas.

This is precisely the group of people we set out to bring together.

Our goal is to present several chamber music programs each season featuring Israeli artists. We will use these programs to create a center, or focal point, for Israeli artists living in Israel and abroad to come together and celebrate our common traditions of music making and interpretation. We hope that with time our platform will create a platform for this tradition to grow and develop further, as well as allow us the opportunity to bring a new generation of players into its fold.

We plan to present old friends, as well as people who have not played together since childhood. We will feature musicians who live and work in Israel as well as ones who have not performed in Israel in many years. And mostly, we hope to translate the strong bilateral relationships we have with each other into a swarming hive of ideas and fantastic music making.

We are extremely proud to present our upcoming concerts. We have assembled the "Dream Team" of Israeli chamber musicians, who will perform some old war horses of the chamber music repertoire, alongside some less-known (unjustly in our opinion) works, capped by selected new commissions by leading Israeli composers. Assembling the participants and repertoire has been a work of love for us. In the final moments before the curtain rises, we have butterflies in our stomachs, an eagerness to finally start, but mostly anticipation to see you amongst our audience, and invite you into our musical conversation.

Ori Kam and Kristina Reiko Cooper, artistic directors