Sally is sponsored by the Nancy T. and David A. Borghesi Fund for Midsummer’s 2024 season.
A member of Midsummer’s Music, violist Sally Chisholm has concertized across three continents.
Chisholm’s extensive chamber music collaborations include performing as a member of the Pro Arte Quartet, and founding member of the Thouvenel String Quartet with whom she toured Europe, China and Lhasa, Tibet. Known for championing the works of great American composers, the Thouvenel Quartet has commissioned works from Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Ernst Krenek, among others. Recipients of the first prize at the Weiner International Chamber Music Competition, they were also finalists of New York’s Naumburg Competition, and performed on NBC’s TODAY Show. Chisholm is a permanent member of the Northern Lights Chamber Music Institute, and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota where she has collaborated with guest artists including Anthony McGill, Nobuko Imai, Samuel Rhodes, and Leon Fleisher. She returns to the Marlboro Music Festival this summer for her tenth season.
A champion of new music, Chisholm’s recent premieres include the Harbison Nine Rasas in NY, the world premiere of the Harbison Viola Sonata, and soon with the Pro Arte and Samuel Rhodes the world premiere of the Harbison Viola Quintet. Last month Grammy nominated Paul Wiancko completed for Chisholm his quintet for viola and string quartet 1+1+1+1.
In addition to her 14th year at the Marlboro Festival, Chisholm toured with the Musicians of Marlboro last February with concerts in Connecticut, Vermont, the Philadelphia Kimmel Center, the Boston Longy School, and Carnegie Hall in NYC. She loves fast electric cars and is a fan of the NBA.
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by Judy Widen
Violist Sally Chisholm has experienced many exciting firsts in her life as a professional musician, and 2019 provided yet another. On a cold, snowy February night in Madison, Wisconsin, Sally took center stage at the University of Wisconsin’s Mills Concert Hall and introduced not just to the eager audience assembled before her, but to the entire world of classical music, The Viola Sonata, by contemporary American Composer John Harbison. Harbison wrote his Viola Sonata for Sally to premiere in a program celebrating the composers 80th birthday. She was joined by University of Minnesota pianist Timothy Lovelace. “I think it’s just a wonderful contribution to the viola repertoire. As I have played quite a bit of his music, I have found it to be one of the most personal pieces I’ve played of his,” said Chisholm, who has known Harbison since moving to Madison in the 1990s. A gift of $700,000 for the creation of a Strings Scholarship for the University of Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music was also announced at this concert.
Following the excitement of the world premiere performance, Sally acknowledged the applause and then assumed her familiar role as violist of the Pro Arte Quartet and played the second half of the glorious evening flanked by her musical colleagues of 25 years: David Perry, Suzanne Beia, and Parry Karp. Wisconsinites have become accustomed to having this world famous quartet as a jewel in the state’s crown. The Pro Arte Quartet travels through the state, playing annually in many small towns or school auditoriums, where the chance to hear and see live chamber music would not be possible were it not for the University of Wisconsin and Pro Arte. Sally was pleased to be able to choose the title of Germain Prevost Professor of Music to attach to her name, because it ties her to the original violist of Pro Arte who played from the inception of Pro Arte in 1910 to 1947, just after the quartet moved from Belgium to Madison, Wisconsin.
Following Sally’s world premiere of The Viola Sonata, the 6-movement work has been programmed on concerts throughout the country including performances in New York and San Francisco. She counts among her friends and musical collaborators Leon Fleisher, Sam Rhodes, and Nobuko Imai to name a few. For 12 years, she has taught and performed at the world famous Marlboro Festival in southern Vermont.
The Marlboro Festival, founded in 1951 just a few years after the Pro Arte Quartet found its new home in Madison, Wisconsin, share a common characteristic with the Wisconsin group. Both sets of founders were fleeing the Nazi invasion of Europe and its aftermath, seeking a new home, a place where outstanding musicians would be free to flourish and create and perform new works. While Pro Arte is dedicated to enabling Wisconsinites to see and hear great music in the towns where they live, Marlboro is a creative retreat in a remote area of Vermont, where artists come to regenerate their creativity in a place freed from the conflicts of the outside world. The stress is greatly lessened by only having weekly performances for outside audiences. The emphasis is on learning and inspiration. This kind of annual recharging of one’s creativity is tonic for the musician, exactly as its founders wanted it to be. Sally Chisholm, in her dozen years as a mentor at Marlboro has flourished and continued to master her own craft as she has helped dozens of talented young musicians become even more skilled at theirs. This dual mission: to play music and to impart the skills to others is so perfectly balanced in Sally Chisholm that it is difficult to say on which side of the equation she is more at home.
Sally and her husband since college, violinist Gene Purdue, are experienced and cherished teachers. They actually share, with other Midsummers musicians, fond memories of the master teaching environment that they so loved as students at Indiana University’s School of Music. The skills and insights they received from their teachers there have only grown since their days in Bloomington, Indiana. They still speak somewhat in awe of their mentors: Gyorgy Sebok, Janos Starker, George Gingold, and Tadeusz Wronski, and the master classes that were so powerful and unforgettable. Sally and Gene went on from IU to travel to other countries and continents, to learn more from international master classes and performances. After college, Sally and Gene formed the Thouvenel Quartet and concertized throughout three continents including North Korea! Today their home is in Madison, Wisconsin, far from the neighboring Oklahoma cities of Shawnee and Ponca City where they grew up.
If introducing Harbison’s Viola Sonata to the world was the exciting event that launched the year 2019 for Sally Chisholm, it is followed closely by another memorable event that may play an even larger role in her daily life, especially her life on the road between Madison and Door County. Sally realized a long-held dream: she owns and drives an electric car, a Tesla! This experience fulfills two passions for Sally: one, she drives a new, sleek, good-looking car, and two, she is helping to save the planet. This is no passing fancy for Sally; she is dedicated to making our world greener and safer.
As a climax to my intermittent interview of Sally about her life, she invited me to take a drive with her in her new Tesla! I expected a smooth and quiet drive, sensitive to changes in the road, the climate, the altitude, et al. What I experienced was far more. The ride was smooth and silent, as anticipated, but it was really intuitive as well: the large screen on the dashboard told me everything I needed to know about how Sally was driving: which lane we were in at the moment and who was coming up fast behind us, what lane to be alert to, how much electricity we were using, and – very important – how far we were from the next place where we could refresh our supply of electricity.
I learned that Door County is blessed with many re-powering posts, and where they are (3 in Baileys Harbor!) and how much we were spending on our test drive. Although I did not see it on the screen, proud driver Sally announced to me that the drive from Madison to my house in Baileys Harbor cost only $3.00! In this beginning of a new era, one devoted to saving our planet, Sally Chisholm is a champion of cars that are freed from the guzzling of gasoline and oil. I cherish the memory of my first ride in a Tesla with a renowned violist at the wheel.