BEETHOVEN, BARBER & BEYOND: At Carolina Summer Music Festival, you can find classical repertory ... and much more

Chamber music is more than the string quartets of Beethoven and the piano trios of Brahms. Any style can fall under the genre's umbrella as long as it involves one player on a part.

Musicians have been propagating this idea for some time, as has Chamber Music America, a service organization. But how might this inclusiveness look and sound around Winston-Salem?

The Carolina Summer Music Festival will provide some intriguing answers beginning Wednesday in several venues around town.

There will be plenty of hard-core classical repertory through Aug. 29, ranging from MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, for solo piano, to Beethoven's Quintet in E Flat Major, for piano and winds. But beyond that, the offerings start to look much less conventional:

□ "Carolina Scrapbook," a morning concert for families Aug. 29 at the Gray Auditorium, will feature brass players from the Winston-Salem Symphony performing everything from a suite of Renaissance fare to arrangements of Beach Music. The aim is to present a multi-media history tour of North Carolina's sights and sounds, narrated by Lanie Pope, a meteorologist for WXII-12.

"You get a whole range of things in 45 minutes," said Joe Mount, one of the festival's three artistic directors. The other directors are violinist Jacqui Carrasco and flutist Elizabeth Ransom.

□ "Tango," on the evening of Aug. 29 at Gray Auditorium in the Old Salem Visitor Center, will feature music of the late Astor Piazzolla, including a rarely heard sextet and L'histoire du tango, for flute (Elizabeth Ransom) and guitar (Joseph Pecoraro). It has been organized by Jacqui Carrasco, a local classical violinist who has made the music of Piazzolla (1921-1992) one of her specialties.

□ "My Funny Valentine," on Saturday in Gray Auditorium, will jazz things up with vocalist Martha Bassett joining several of the area's finest musicians in performances of selections by Rodgers and Hart.

All that jazz

"We're thinking that jazz is part of our mission, not just something we add on to the festival," Mount said.

Indeed, jazz has become so important to the festival that Matt Kendrick, a double-bass player, has joined the festival's board. He played a leading role in "Gershwin, By George," the jazz concert presented at the festival last year. "Gershwin" generated so much demand that this year, the festival will offer not one but two performances of "My Funny Valentine" in the same evening. The rest of the festival programs will be offered once.

Although local jazz suffered a blow with the recent closing of Speakeasy Jazz on Fourth St., Mount seemed bullish about jazz's future prospects at the festival.

"We have some great jazz musicians in the area," he said. "The audience is strong for jazz."

And tango, too

As for "Tango," Carrasco, the program's principal organizer, plugged Tango Seis, which was chosen because it features parts for all three of the festival's artistic directors as well as parts for piano, clarinet and bassoon.

Carrasco suggested that classical players come by tango naturally.

"It connects to what we've done in classical music so much," she said. "Most of the players who were doing (tango) in the early 1900s were classical players. They were just kind of expanding their repertoire in a sense. It's just really fun music. They're great tunes."

The second half of "Tango" will feature trios that can be danced to. Carrasco said that several couples will dance and the one might do a "show" routine.

"It's a perfect setting in Old Salem for dancing," she said. "It's a flexible floor pattern. We can leave some space up in the front, while we will still be on stage."

Another highlight of this year's festival, a presentation of Old Salem Museum & Gardens and the Carolina Chamber Symphony Players of Winston-Salem, will be "American Landscapes," next Sunday at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. This program is inspired by the "Heroes of Horticulture" exhibit at Reynolda House. It will include MacDowell's From an Old Garden, Vaughan Williams' Along the Field as well as Hannah's Glade, which was written Gary Schocker, an American flutist and composer.

"Jacqui Carrasco and I enjoyed selecting repertoire primarily by American composers who were inspired by landscape and nature as they composed music," Ransom e-mailed. "We are excited to share with the audience such lovely and picturesque works."

■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com