Interview with Elena Urioste: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective To Tour U.S.

November 24, 2023, 6:09 PM · They might have met on a musical "blind date," but here is a married couple with vision.

You may remember American violinist Elena Urioste and British pianist Tom Poster as the couple who appeared on our Violinist.com Gilharmonic series back in 2020, performing and doing an interview from their London flat. Their Jukebox videos kept us entertained during the worst of the pandemic, and the resulting Jukebox Album earned them 2022 BBC Music Magazine Award.

Now they are about to hit the road with Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the chamber group that they co-founded in 2017. Comprised of both British and American musicians, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective currently serves as the Associate Ensemble at London's Wigmore Hall, where they recently performed concerts with star violinist Hilary Hahn. Their upcoming tour will be their debut in the United States, starting at Baltimore's Shriver Hall Concert Series on Dec. 3, then making various stops along the East Coast over the following 10 days. (Find information and ticket links to all their upcoming performances here.)

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective: clockwise from top left: Melissa White, Elena Urioste, Tom Poster, Juan-Miguel Hernandez, Joseph Conyers, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Laura van der Heijden.

Recently I spoke with Elena, who has a long list of accomplishments herself, including winning the Sphinx Competition (the Junior Division in 2003, then the Senior Division in 2007) and later receiving the Sphinx Medal of Excellence in 2012, graduating from Curtis and Juilliard, performing as a soloist for major orchestras across the globe, co-founding a yoga retreat for musicians, and more. She and Tom still make their home in London, along with their young son Tico.

We spoke about how she and Tom met, about the idea behind the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, and her thoughts about returning to the country where she grew up for this upcoming tour.

Laurie: Starting at the very beginning - how did you and Tom meet? Was it a musical meeting to begin with? How long have you two been married?

Elena: Tom and I met on a musical "blind date" orchestrated by BBC Radio 3 in 2013 — I was a New Generation Artist from 2012-14 and had been flying over every few months with my American recital partner at the time, Michael Brown, to make studio recordings for the scheme.

Eventually the BBC got fed up with paying two transatlantic airfares and suggested that I record with someone based in London. Tom Poster and I were thus booked in for a day of rehearsals and a recording at Maida Vale Studios. We connected instantly — totally platonically and professionally, as we were both in very different lives back then — and the music-making felt effortless. We had a drink at a local pub afterwards, said our good-byes, and went our separate ways.

A few years later I was set to be the artist-in-residence at the lovely Roman River Festival, and as part of my stint there I was invited to give a recital. I suggested Tom as my duo partner, as I remembered how wonderful it felt to play together, and as it turned out he was a "festival favorite" there anyway (as the promotor delighted in telling me!).

This time during our rehearsal process, sparks began to fly, and although the path that unfolded over the next year or so was in no way straightforward, our relationship eventually bloomed from professional to something more. We got married in a Philadelphia park with a Quaker license (a Pennsylvania custom where you can essentially declare yourselves married without the input of an official — we enjoyed both the tradition and its slightly subversive implications) on August 9, 2019, which we would probably forget each year were it not also the date our son Tico was born two years later!

Tom Poster, Elena Urioste and their son Tico. Photo by Bill Knight Photography

Laurie: What prompted you to start Kaleidoscope? What is the philosophy behind it?

Elena Our initial impulse to create a chamber collective was derived simply from the desire to play — or continue playing, I should say — music that we love with people that we love.

Tom and I had both reached a point in our respective careers where we felt it would be rewarding to have more agency over our musical lives — to build something from the ground up with our own values at the center, rather than always being at the mercy of others in the industry inviting us along for the ride.

Speaking personally, I suppose Kaleidoscope’s conception in 2017 fell at a time when I was on the brink of leaving my home in New York City — for a number of reasons, but in part because of the sadness I felt at not having felt included in many of the preexisting chamber music societies/circles/"clubs" in the States (certainly not for lack of trying!). I had a fulfilling, busy career as a soloist and my gratitude for those concert opportunities remains endless, but feeling a bit like an outsider on the chamber music scene — which most freelance musicians will tell you is the place they feel most fulfilled — heightened my desire to create something of my own. I wanted to be someone who could potentially provide opportunities for others, and enable the musicians that I loved and believed in to shine as brightly as possible, each in their own unique ways.

One of the characteristics of our Kaleidoscope roster that we’re most proud of is that the people whose music-making and onstage charisma we’re most drawn to also happen to encompass an incredibly wide range of backgrounds, nationalities, ages, and stories; and without exception whenever we all come together to make music, something incredibly special happens.

Laurie: Tell me about the tour - why did you want to go to the U.S.? What made you choose those particular cities? It looks like the repertoire will be a bit different at each stop, what binds it together, though?

Elena As an ex-pat living in London, I'm keen not to lose connection with the country in which I grew up, both personally and musically, even though I love my adopted home. Philadelphia is where I was raised, went to conservatory, and it's where I still feel the most rooted in the States; using that city as a launching-off point, I went through my American contacts (series I’d both played at in the past and have always admired/aspired to playing for) and lo and behold, a little East Coast tour materialized! It’s been a pleasant surprise how accessible the process has been — I wouldn’t call it easy, putting together a tour for a chamber ensemble for the first time, but I’ve learned that if you do a bit of research, ask nicely, and present ideas thoughtfully and thoroughly, things have a way of unfolding positively.

In terms of programming, we wanted to be sure to include a few Kaleidoscope "signatures" on our inaugural trip to the States. We were lucky and honored to make the world premiere recording of Florence Price’s Piano Quintet in A minor, and the Amy Beach Quintet became an instant obsession when we first explored it in 2019. (Those two composers also happen to be, conveniently, American!) We wanted to present options to presenters without completely overwhelming ourselves, so we made a compact musical "menu," offering two or three choices for each slot on the program.

As a result, we were able to devise programs that made everyone — musicians and presenters alike — happy, featuring the aforementioned signature pieces and composers we adore (Price, Beach, Walker), some fabulous living voices (Jessie Montgomery, Gabriella Smith), and celebrated favorites (Dohnanyi, Schubert). The programs feel, well, appropriately Kaleidoscopic!

Laurie: Tell me about rehearsing and recording "in a circle" - what does it do for your ensemble to play that way?

Elena Due to space constraints at the home where the collective generally rehearses, we often find ourselves smooshing into a circle — it’s compact, but it also helps significantly in feeling like we can all make contact with each other and hear one another in greater detail. Of course when we perform we have to situate ourselves according to the stage, our audience, and the acoustics in the room, but for a recording where the microphones can be positioned in any number of ways, we were curious about what it would feel like to take the cozy circle from our house rehearsals into the studio. The microphones were placed in the center of our ring, and we were able to uphold the intimacy, attention to detail, and contact that we so enjoyed in our rehearsals.

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For more information, about Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective's upcoming tour, click here. For the tour, the group will comprise Elena and Tom as well as violinist Melissa White; violists Juan-Miguel Hernandez and Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt; cellist Laura van der Heijden and double bassist Joseph Conyers. They will perform repertoire ranging from Schubert's Adagio and Rondo Concertante and Mendelssohn's Piano Sextet to Gabriella Smith's Divertimento and piano quintets by Amy Beach and Florence Price. Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective also was nominated for a Gramophone Award for its recording of works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and it has made a number of other recordings, including its most recent, Transfigured.

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Interview with Elena Urioste: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective To Tour U.S.

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