In 2018, local sons James Garlick and Richard O’Neill together founded Music on the Strait (MOTS) in partnership with the Port Angeles Symphony, as a summer chamber festival in Port Angeles. The aim is to make chamber music performed by artists of international caliber accessible to residents of the Olympic Peninsula. This marvel-filled region on the “other side” of Puget Sound — paradise for nature lovers — is surprisingly close to Seattle but vastly distant in ethos and even climate. Though only 80-something miles away, Port Angeles requires a substantial day trip from the Emerald City (via either a ferry ride or a longer detour by land).
The prolonged, silent fermata caused by the pandemic intruded after just two years of building up momentum (though Music on the Strait was able to produce two live-stream programs over the past year). Even so, MOTS pulled off an inspired and inspiring opening weekend with a return to live performance at Maier Hall on the main campus of Peninsula College located in Port Angeles. It’s a small, warm, intimate space ideal for chamber music and seemed to be pulsating with anticipation as the audience gathered on Saturday night for the second program of this opening weekend (the first I was able to catch). MOTS required vaccination cards as well as masks, and patrons effortlessly complied.
Garlick is a violinist who hails from Port Angeles itself but is currently based in Minneapolis, while the violist O’Neill, a native of nearby Sequim, has long been a regular presence at the Seattle Chamber Music Society festivals. Earlier this year, O’Neill joined the storied Takács Quartet and won his first Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental solo (for his recording of Christopher Theofanides’s Viola Concerto).
The two MOTS cofounders and artistic directors started off the program with a duo for their respective instruments by the Norwegian composer, conductor, and violinist Johan Halvorsen — or rather, Halvorsen’s late-Romantic elaboration on the Sarabande from Handel’s D minor Harpsichord Suite. The harmonic sequence is mighty reminiscent of the ear-wiggy La Folia craze that took Europe by storm centuries ago — hence the nickname “Handel’s Folia” — but Halvorsen’s treatment engraves the music with a tremendously “non-HIP” solemnity that requires its own historically informed practice, so distant has this Victorian era aesthetic become. It was intriguing to hear (and see) Garlick and O’Neill exchange and fuse their notably different playing styles and gestural languages.
Jeremy Denk has close ties to MOTS — he was a featured artist in the inaugural season — and he is cast in a central role in the 2021 edition as well. Though his mask made him appear slightly surreal in the heat of the moment (especially given his fondness for turning from the Steinway to glance at the audience or, later, his fellow musicians), the pianist’s gregarious, stimulating, and entertaining artistic personality was fully on display. Denk prefaced his account of J.S. Bach’s G major Partita No. 5, BWV 829, by describing it as the work of a “wicked, smiling, rambunctious rapscallion” who delighted in confounding the church elders with wild modulations and far-roaming fantasies. And that was just how he played the Partita, emphasizing every moment of wit and invention with a willful, winning eccentricity. It seemed very much of our time, of a desperate need to accentuate how music matters, even at its most playful. Amid all the frolicking, the Sarabande had a directness that was deeply touching.
Denk approached the final Gigue as if it were a study for late Beethoven (admittedly, easier to do with Bach-on-piano). Similarly, he found in Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins’s The Battle of Manassas a provocatively avant-garde take on program music and a fascination for sound collage and cluster chords decades ahead of Charles Ives. The piece also calls for spoken (shouted) “tags” from the pianist, with Denk briefly pulling down his mask to announce such events as the approach of the Southern Army in this extraordinary evocation of the 1861 victory of Confederate forces in the First Battle of Bull Run — a musical equivalent of the once-popular panorama paintings that were 19th-century precursors to film.
The Battle of Manassas was part of a set that included Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s transcription of They Will Not Lend Me a Child (Op. 59, no. 4), played with spacious grandeur and an affectionately meditative account of Scott Joplin’s 1907 Heliotrope Bouquet (cowritten with Louis Chauvin), culminating in one of the North American Ballads by the late Frederic Rzewski. Denk chose Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, inspired by a folk song connected to the labor struggle of textile workers at a South Carolina plant in the 1930s. Rzewski’s grinding, machine-like ostinati suggested a provocative counterpart to the “Blind Tom” Wiggins piece — in both cases, Denk thundered relentlessly from the lower depths, using the keyboard to transport us inside the action. But the victory in Rzewski’s mini-epic is intensely rewarding: the emergence of song, of humanity, that hoists itself above brutal, indifferent implacability.
Denk joined with the Takács Quartet — another clear win for this edition of MOTS — in a deep dive into Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44 (which the Takács has recorded with Marc-André Hamelin). They reveled in the enormous diversity of this pathbreaking score’s emotional terrain, at times stretching the flexibility of its language to a near-breaking point. The opening movement, with its outsize exuberance, plummeted into gloom in the funeral march that ensues and which they rendered with a powerfully effective slow burn — seemingly encapsulating the composer’s polar extremes. It’s become a challenge not to read a subtext of our recent collective suffering into these familiar musical journeys — in this case, the nervous pauses and pent-up tensions of the march seemed especially telling. The Scherzo, effusive and ebullient, helped light the way back toward a hope that took root in the finale’s polyphonic splendor, brightening into plausible joy.
–(c)2021 Thomas May — All rights reserved
Filed under: chamber music, Music on the Strait, review
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 