Tippet Rise Art Center launches its 2022 season on Friday. For five weeks, from26 August to 25 September, the rural Montana-based festival will present 50 works in some 15 concerts, including three world premieres. Friday evening’s concert at the Olivier Music Barn unveils the first of these new works: a new composition for solo cello by Reena Esmail, which the Canadian cellist Arlen Hlusko will premiere. The program also features violinist Jennifer Frautschi and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári in Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 22 in A major, K. 305, and all three musicians in Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 2 in F Major, Op. 80.
Following several days of showcasing the young generation with performances by various youth orchestras, Lucerne Festival’s summer of music for 2022 officially launches tomorrow, 12 August. Riccardo Chailly will conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of music by Wolfgang Rihm, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Rachmaninoff, with Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist in Saint-Georges’ Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, no. 2.
This summer’s theme is “Diversity.” The Festival describes the program as follows:
“For a long stretch, until the post-war decades, time seemed to stand still in the classical music scene. Orchestras were a male domain — women could only be found playing the harp or in the ranks of the violins. People of color were almost non-existent, and Asian women had to fight for their place on the stage. Of course, the leadership was also in male hands: the conductor was to be addressed as “maestro” or, in German orchestras, as “Meister” or “Herr Professor.” The repertoire, in turn, was limited to the Eurocentric canon of works, including the Viennese classics, the German-Austrian Romantics, plus Italian opera and a few coloristic touches from the fringes of Europe. This monoculture even persisted with respect to the audience, since access was found primarily among educated bourgeois circles who had enough income for musical pursuits.
A great deal has of course changed since then, yet a lot still remains to be done. Through this summer’s theme of “Diversity,” we want to make a plea for genuine diversity in classical music. That is why we have invited artists from demographic groups that were previously underrepresented in the scene. A number of women have made their mark on the program, and many works that are inherently diverse or have never been heard here before will be performed. And with affordable offers like the “Overture” presented by international youth orchestras, we hope to prove that enjoying classical music is not a question of money. Because music is for everyone.”
Andres Acosta as Nemorino in Seattle Opera’s production of “The Elixir of Love.” (Sunny Martini)
Seattle Opera’s new season has opened with a production of The Elixir of Love, Donizetti’s melodrammagiocoso from 1832. Although I have to miss these performances, I reviewed the company’s production directed by David Gately when it was presented at the height of the pandemic virtually, as a film (with a different cast and a very small ensemble):
While the world pins its hope on a coronavirus vaccine, another elixir is getting top billing at Seattle Opera…
Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic at Bravo! Vail. (Photo by Tom Cohen for Bravo! Vail Music Festival)
This summer I was able to visit the Bravo! Vail Music Festival in the heart of Colorado during the New York Philharmonic’s residency. Here’s my report for Classical Voice North America:
VAIL, Colo. — More than one-and-a-half miles above sea level, there’s a special tang to the music. Or perhaps it’s a side-effect of the serene backdrop of wooded slopes, alpine flowers, and spectacular cloud formations. Whatever the reason, the fading A minor chord that closes the lid on Mahler’s Sixth Symphony reverberated with a peculiar blend of shell-shocked dread and exuberant release.
Emmett O’Hanlon, Isabel Leonard, Leonard Slatkin; photo (c)Carly Finke
Here’s my report on the New York Philharmonic’s closing orchestral concert of the 2022 Bravo Vail Music Festival:
One of four orchestras appearing at Bravo! Vail this summer, the New York Philharmonic brought along six different programmes, the first four of which were led by music director Jaap van Zweden – including a cathartic Mahler Sixth. Leonard Slatkin took over the reins for the remaining two programmes in the open-air main venue: an all-Tchaikovsky evening and this concluding concert, “A Sondheim Celebration”….
The New York Philharmonic with cellist Zlatomir Fung and Leonard Slatkin; photo (c) Jorge Gustavo Elias
The conductor for last night’s Bravo Vail concert with the New York Philharmonic was to have been the much-loved Bramwell Tovey, who passed away on July 12. Leonard Slatkin, who took his place on the podium, paid tribute with a deeply felt interpretation of “Nimrod” from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” as the encore. Slatkin was completely in his element for this sold-out, all-Tchaikovsky concert — and not just for the blockbuster works (the “Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture” and Fifth Symphony) but the “Rococo Variations” they framed. You could feel him drawing on his vast experience with and love for this music to shape a dramatic arc that overwhelmed with its intensity in both R&J and the Fifth. But he was also brought out Tchaikovsky’s neoclassical finesse in the Variations, which showcased the refined, poetic musicianship of cello soloist Zlatomir Fung.
Verona Quartet with Anne-Marie McDermott, photo (c) Jorge Gustavo Elias
Last night I got my first sample of the chamber side of Bravo! Vail Music Festival with a smart program featuring the Verona Quartet and Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott at the keyboard. Puccini’s early “Crisantemi” and the first of Beethoven’s Op. 18 string quartets revealed a flair for finely calibrated ensemble balance and color, with a cross-connection of moods traced between Beethoven’s Adagio and the elegiac Puccini miniature.
For me the highlight was an impassioned performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 1 — also a youthful work, in fact written when he was only 18 — for which McDermott joined the Veronese to play the taxing, ever-present piano part with power and poise. Together they made a brilliant case for this shamefully long ignored gem, obviously enjoying the fecundity of Coleridge-Taylor’s imagination. Captivating from start to finish, this is the kind of performance that thankfully is reclaiming his work the repertoire.
Just some quick first impressions on my first trip to the Bravo!Vail Music Festival. It began Saturday with the second of four concerts of the New York Philharmonic‘s 2022 residency here. I admired Conrad Tao’s deeply personal and inventive account of Mozart’s G major Concerto K. 453 (including his own cadenzas) and a stirring Dvořák Seventh, all prefaced by Nina Shenkhar’s new “Lumina,” an exquisite study of light and shade.
The program was led by Jaap van Zweden, who returned last night with a knockout interpretation of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Sunday’s moody weather provided a fitting backdrop and also made me wonder whether we would have thunder underlining the hammer strokes — or even adding an extra one. But the skies behaved, and in any case all ears were intent on every gesture coming from the crowded Ford Amphitheater stage. Van Zweden’s laser focus drew remarkably tight, driven playing from the musicians but also left plenty of room for expressive and impactful solos. Mahler’s uncompromising symphonic juggernaut had its devastating effect but paradoxically left the audience exuberant, even overjoyed — an aftereffect of catharsis?
The news that 29-year-old Jonathon Heyward has been named Baltimore Symphony’s new music director is most welcome. His tenure will start at the beginning of the 2023-24 season and is for an initial five-year term.
I noted last year that this is an artist who would go far. When I reviewed his Seattle Symphony debut in June 2019, I wrote that “the chemistry between them produced such subtle and winning results that it defies belief they haven’t been regular collaborators for years.”
The only downside is that this development puts him out of the running for Seattle Symphony as it embarks on its search for a new music director.
Today marks the 90th birthday of the phenomenally imaginative, innovative, and prolific Per Nørgård. The eminent Danish composer, born in Copenhagen in 1932, grew up in a non-musical family but showed talent at an early age. The evolution of his musical language has been fascinating to behold, moving from an identification with the sound world of Sibelius and “the universe of the Nordic mind” (his phrase) to experiments with European Modernism, the development of a unique kind of serialism through his “infinity series” method, and on to the astonishing series of transformations in his style ever since.
Fellow composer Karl Aage Rasmussen describes Nørgård’s inspirations as based in an openness to “the unending variety in nature, the endless connections between things, and not least the infinitely complex universe represented by any sound, no matter how modest.”
MEMETERIA 