Madison Chamber Players are a new kind of ensemble | Music

Last year, conductor Louis Vajda found an unmet need in Madison’s vibrant chamber music scene.

“Something was missing in Madison and at the UW,” said Vadja, a second-year doctoral candidate in wind conducting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And he knew what it was: “A mixed chamber ensemble of students and community members that goes into community spaces off campus.”

In summer 2025, Vajda, along with cofounders Amanda Givens (who recently graduated with her masters in flute performance from UW) and Josh Baker (a doctoral student at UW in saxophone performance), formed the Madison Chamber Players. Its mission: to create broadly accessible performances with a focus on innovative works by living and emerging composers. 

The group sits somewhere between a community and professional ensemble with a quality of play closer to the latter. For students at UW-Madison, it provides off-campus performance opportunities. And for community members, it offers a musical outlet for players who cannot commit to a more intense rehearsal schedule. 

When programming concerts, the group uses a modular, project-based model. Roughly 40 members form into smaller ensembles (trios, octets, etc.) that rehearse only in the weeks leading up to a performance. The resulting concerts are varied and eclectic in the best of ways, juxtaposing ensembles one normally would not find on the same concert program.

At concerts, all members sit in the audience and come to the stage only when it is their turn to perform, giving Madison Chamber Players performances an especially communal feel. This is a winning equation, and the ensemble draws people to its concerts that a university-centered ensemble would never see.

“When people go to a concert, they don’t want to just have the lights turn off and have two hours of music happen to them and go home,” Vajda said. “They want to be part of that creative spontaneous experience, part of the community.”

The ensemble had a successful inaugural concert at Muso in August 2025 and a second in November at the Hamel Music Center on campus. The latter included the Midwest premiere of Conni Ellisor’s stunning work for brass and percussion, “Wind from the Mountain.” The group has three performances planned for 2026. 

‘Like rock ‘n’ roll for chamber music’

Madison Chamber Players’ first concert of the year will be at The Bur Oak on Feb. 15. The program is well-suited for the intimate venue, which often highlights folk, rock, jazz and indie artists. 

After opening with the very punchy “Ecstatic Science” by Missy Mazzoli, the group will perform a Wisconsin premiere of Ivette Herryman Rodriguez’s “Adagio y Danza” for brass trio. The work’s first movement is slow and measured, while the second movement is inspired by Cuban dance music, with clear rhythmic references. 

Next will be the rather showy “Suite Francaise” by Guy Woolfenden followed by James Stephenson’s “Octet,” inspired by and orchestrated for the same ensemble as Stravinsky’s famous “Octet for Wind Instruments.” 

With its driving minimalist groove, “Stephenson’s piece is like rock ‘n’ roll for chamber music,” Vajda said. 

The concert will close with Grammy Award-winning composer Jessie Montgomery’s “Break Away,” a five-movement string quartet that seamlessly juxtaposes abstract harmonies with song-like melodic passages, making it both intriguing and approachable.

An ensemble blossoms

On April 18 at Collins Recital Hall in the Hamel Music Center at UW,  the Madison Chamber Players will play Christopher Cerrone’s “The Branch Will Not Break,” a setting for vocal octet and 10 instruments of James Wright’s 1963 set of poems by the same name. Admission will be free. 

Sarah Brailey, who is on the voice faculty in UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, sang on the Grammy Award-nominated recording of the work and invited the Madison Chamber Players to perform it along with her UW-based vocal ensemble C8dence. Brailey will be coaching the ensemble in preparation for the performance. 

The work’s movements vacillate between scenes of pastoral serenity and deep emotional woe, inspiring resilience in the face of loss and hardship. While the work was composed in 2015, “the work has new meaning in the present context,” said Vajda.

Throughout the piece, dissonant yet serene harmonies balance its heavy lyrics with the texture of the chamber ensemble. The opening movement, after a thin tenor-bass duet, ends with a full choir repetition of the penetrating lyric, “I have wasted my life.”

In its closing, the final movement overlaps three lines: “Suddenly I realize/ if I step out of my body/ I would break/ into blossom,” forming a cacophony of shimmering harmonies that set up a poignant a capella ending.

Finally, details are still to come for the Madison Chamber Players’ concert at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in May. For more information about the ensemble or to join, visit madisonchamberplayers.com.