Playing Prokofiev or the tango, the Jersey City chamber music group Con Vivo is willing to explore various musical styles.
“We want to reflect the life around us, the different cultures and races,” said Amelia Hollander Ames, the founder of Con Vivo and a downtown Jersey City resident.
Ames, who has played the violin since the age of 4 and viola since she was 13, has performed on stage in many different countries, including Israel, where she also resided for a period of time. But Ames, 30, who grew up in Jersey City on Montgomery Street, wanted people in her hometown to experience music that people in other places are used to hearing.
“Growing up, I played in the New York Youth symphony, and everything I would do with classical music was taking me out of Jersey City,” Ames said. “In Jersey City, the impression I got was that classical music was seen as so far from the mainstream. But that’s only if you don’t know about it.”
Ames started Con Vivo in 2007 as a chamber music ensemble, which means they are a group without a conductor, or as Ames puts it, “no different than a band.” Usually they consist of a string quartet of musicians playing violin, viola, and cello, although depending on the specific performance, there can a guest bass violin, guitar, oboe and clarinet and the occasional mezzo-soprano.
In its two years, Con Vivo has performed all over Jersey City and is currently in the midst of its Spring Quartet Festival, which kicked off earlier this month with a May 3 performance at St. Paul’s Church near Journal Square, and May 8 at Downtown Jersey City’s Grace Church Van Vorst.
This Sunday (May 17) at 4 p.m. at Temple Beth El, 2419 Kennedy Blvd., Con Vivo will perform the works of Israeli composers with a Concert of Honor of Yom Yerusahalayim (Jerusalem Day). They will premiere a new composition, Simon Fink’s “Pastoral,” selected from Con Vivo’s first international composition competition. And on May 27, they will do “Boricua for Strings,” a program of Puerto Rican and Argentinean music at Grove Street PATH Plaza starting at 6 p.m.
Stringing along new ears
Ames, currently a music teacher at the Third Street Music School Settlement and at the City and Country School, both in Manhattan, started Con Vivo with musicians she met in Maine while performing chamber music there. But she wanted to make the music more local and started finding musicians closer to home.
“We did a piece by Brahms and this group of kids was riding their bikes, and then they stopped their bikes.” – Amelia Hollander Ames
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Kids look up
The next step in making the music local was to perform for locals, which Ames and company started doing when they did some practicing in the gazebo of Van Vorst Park on Montgomery Street, only blocks away from Ames’ home, starting in the summer of 2007.
“One of the best moments I ever had as a performer was when we were playing in the park the first time,” Ames said. “We did a piece by Brahms and this group of kids was riding their bikes, and then they stopped their bikes and they were just listening. I was so psyched that they got sucked in and were paying attention.”
Ames said that experience is actually not unusual for Con Vivo whenever they perform in town.
“Whenever we have played here, the audience is very responsive and very involved, and we have had feedback,” Ames said. “The city’s a little more jaded, as people are so used to seeing classical music and behave a certain way.”
The inclusive outlook of Con Vivo springs from disparate influences in Ames’ life, whether it was watching Sesame Street with guest appearances by her musical idols Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, or watching video of the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein doing his concerts for young children in the 1960s. Ames sees Con Vivo’s approach in performing as being “inclusive” and shies away from the word “outreach.”
“That word, whenever I hear it said by classical musicians on reaching an audience not used to hearing classical music, sounds so condescending, even if it was meant with the best intentions,” Ames said.
For more on Con Vivo, visit their website at www.convivomusic.org.
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonrreporter.com.