Happy Holidays from Insight Chamber!
- Leah Froyd
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
The Insight Chamber community would love to wish you a very Happy Holidays and New Year! We celebrated last weekend with a thank you dinner for our hosts, donors, and volunteers at the Clocktower Salon. The evening was filled with delicious food and a guided listening of Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E Minor and Rondo k. 373 performed by Leah and Yunyi.
"Your concerts provide us with joy that lasts weeks after you're done playing. Continue filling our cups and souls. THANK YOU"
—Guy & Udi Ledergor, hosts of the Saint Francis Wood Salon
We will take a short break over the holidays but are excited to return in February with returning Insight artists Meghan Crosby-Jolliffe and Dana Marie Chan with our upcoming program, 10th Muse, featuring an original composition by Cooper Grosscup! In addition, we will be adding more free community events in the New Year— stay tuned for more details.
If you or anyone you know would like to support Insight in our next year of concerts, please visit the link below to make a contribution. We are funded by the community and every cent put into Insight goes towards creating more free future events!
Finally, we are very proud to announce our cofounder Ericsson Hatfield’s next musical adventure in Montréal: the Eureka Consort. Ericsson was instrumental in the founding of Insight Chamber and brought together many of our beloved hosts, salons, and creative partners during our first year. We look forward to seeing his new project grow and encourage everyone to follow this new organization’s activities!
For our final guided listening of 2025, we wanted to share Fanny Hensel’s Das Jahr: December and a choral reimagination of Feliz Navidad by our own José Vargas.
Fanny Hensel | Das Jahr: December
Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) was the older sister of well known composer Felix Mendelssohn. Fanny, like Felix, received a rich musical education and the two were very close as siblings. When they began to show aptitude for music, both Felix and Fanny were quickly sent to Paris to study piano more intensely. Back in Berlin, their piano teacher Frederich Zelter raved about Fanny’s abilities in a letter to the poet Goethe,
"…his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special."
Unfortunately, it was highly discouraged for women to attract “too much” attention to themselves and their talents. At 14, Fanny wrote a letter to her father expressing her and her brother’s interests in pursuing music professionally. This was met with harsh words framing the reality of society at the time:
"Music will perhaps become his profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament, never the basis of your being and doing."
Fanny eventually married a painter named Wilhelm Hensel who encouraged her to perform at their musical salons—Sonntagsmusiken— despite the era’s restrictive gender roles. During their courtship, Hensel proclaimed that he refused to marry her unless she continued composing. During their married life, Wilhelm would often leave a page of manuscript painter on Fanny’s desk while he went to paint during the day. In the evening, the two would reconvene to share their artistic creations.
The couple’s Sonntagsmusiken soon became a staple of the Berlin cultural scene attracting compositional giants like Liszt, Paganini, and the Schumanns to both listen and perform. It was here where Fanny was able to cultivate a close circle of artisans and audiences and even perform her own works.
Fanny composed over 500 works in total but only a few were published under her own name. In fact, many works were falsely attributed to her brother Felix simply because they shared the same initials. Most of Fanny’s works remain unpublished to this day as they were only performed at their family’s salons.
Her piece for piano, Das Jahr (The Year), chronicles each month of the year in a wide array of musical vignettes. In the movement titled December, Fanny quickly evokes imagery of a cold winter’s night through flurries of fast alternating notes. This pattern beautifully frames the longer melodic lines woven within the introduction.
The music then pauses making way for a more delicate and calm section in the upper register of the piano. This delicateness comes from a more sparse accompaniment in the left hand and the overall texture resembles a chorale. The harmony gradually develops into a fuller, more saturated sound that closes the piece. Listen for the way the accompaniment transitions to gentle triplets while the right-hand melody soars above.
To me, this through-composed piece (no large musical sections are repeated) suggests a transformation: we begin in the heart of the storm, then make our way indoors— perhaps next to a warm fire surrounded by friends and family to welcome the new year.
José Vargas | Feliz Navidad
This piece was one of ten winners of the International Orange Chorale “Holidays with a Twist” call for scores. The challenge was not to arrange a classic holiday carol, but instead to say something new by reimagining it into a brand new piece. I chose the bilingual classic “Feliz Navidad” which I felt best represented my childhood memories of Christmas time. I began listening to the song to brainstorm my piece, I began to hear my family members’ voices singing.
Some members in my family could sing, others were tone-deaf, but the chorus of Vargas and Rodriguez was something I wish I had cherished more before moving away for college. I was reminded of my first Christmas away from home and how it felt hearing cheerful music in every store while being a thousand miles away from my loved ones. I decided that was the story I would tell through my piece.
As a final holiday listening present we are proud to share a playlist compilation of every work performed by Insight EVER thanks to Cooper Grosscup’s hard work!!
Thank you for your support this year and Happy Holidays from Insight Chamber! We look forward to seeing you fill our salons again in 2026!
Sincerely,
Leah Froyd
President of Insight Chamber
José Daniel Vargas
Board Officer of Insight Chamber
Comments