Michael Adams, who's a violist with the Minnesota Orchestra, sees chamber music as "a great way into a composer's soul. A lot of times, composers write their chamber music to be performed with their friends, by their friends, or for their friends, and it can be very personal." He says we've come a long way since the days of composers like Haydn and Mozart, and not necessarily all for the better: "They'd be horrified if they realized it's become the spectator sport that it has become today, with these giant halls of a thousand people... Which is why we try to keep our venues very intimate: 200 or less, and recreate the atmosphere of chamber music for which it was intended, which is very small, intimate audiences."
Those concerts take place at a changing roster of participating vineyards - although there's a core group they return to again and again: "We play in barrel rooms, we play in tasting rooms, we play in wine caves. It's a real interesting travelogue of the entire Napa Valley, to be able to go to every one of our concerts and then you get a different experience, not only with a different program, but with different wine." One venue that he says they've played each year is the 'cave theater' at Clos Pegase. "The back wall of the stage is a parabola, and the way it focuses sound is quite unique... You get this unbelievable intimacy even at the last row in the cave. You can hear every whisper in there. Audiences seem to love it."
