Chamber Music Concert

The Park City Chamber Music Society was established in 1984 by violist and Juilliard graduate Leslie Blackburn Harlow after she fell in love with Utah and decided to make it her home. At a young age she joined her first serious string quartet and built a reputation as a fine violist dedicated to performing chamber music. While still a student she performed at chamber music festivals and on chamber series throughout the U.S., performing extensively with other accomplished artists before moving to New York City to continue her viola studies. In New York she performed with many of the finest artists of this generation. The experience participating in chamber music festivals inspired her to look for a community where she could found a new chamber music festival.

Invited to perform a summer with the Utah Symphony, she found the location for the new festival which she named the Deer Valley Chamber Music Festival. The inaugural summer featured violinists Glenn Dicterow, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Paul Rosenthal, Bill Preucil and Andres Cardenes, New York Phil principal violist Paul Neubauer, cellist Jeffrey Solow, Bachauer Piano Competition Winner Michael Gurt and pianist Frank Weinstock.

Russell Harlow is internationally-known as one of the most respected chamber music and solo clarinetists today and has been invited to perform as guest artist from Alaska, Canada, across the U.S. and Hawaii to Puerto Rico to Amsterdam, and continues to add to his nearly 800 performances for the Park City Chamber Music Society. 

In the third year of the Festival, Russell Harlow joined the new Deer Valley Festival as co-director. At the age of 21, Russell had been studying in Los Angeles at both USC and UCLA when he auditioned and won his position with the Utah Symphony. Dedicated to chamber music performance, he had founded and directed the Nova Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City. Upon joining the festival in Park City he added a slate of his favorite artists including violinist Charles Libove and pianist Nina Lugovoy, pianist John Jensen and cellist Terry King. 

Pianist and harpsichordist Dr. Pamela Palmer Jones regularly performs at the Festival and throughout the year with the Harlows in Park City, in Salt Lake City at Libby Gardner Hall and in outreach performances throughout Utah. The trio is currently in recording sessions and editing works by Fauré and Prokofiev, along with a collection of engaging concert showpieces by favorite composers. Dr. Jones is one of the most highly sought-after keyboard collaborative artists in the Intermountain area, and has worked extensively as a piano and harpsichord soloist and chamber musician in the United States and Europe.  She is a member of the international artist roster of the Beethoven Festival Park City Festival, and also performs regularly as pianist and harpsichordist with several of Utah’s finest performing ensembles including The Vivaldi Virtuosi, Ensemble Iris, Salt Lake Symphony, and Utah’s newest professional chamber orchestra, Sinfonia Salt Lake.

Together the Harlows and Pamela Palmer Jones will present a concert of their favorite and most popular works from their large repertoire for the upcoming collaboration with the CCAW in August.