astoria music festival – week two round up

There is another week of the Astoria Music Festival, but the orchestra finished it’s part of the festival yesterday afternoon. It was a pretty jam-packed week.

The concerts began Thursday evening with a screening of the 1930 silent movie classic “City Girl” (with its exteriors shot in Eastern Oregon, standing in for Minnesota) with a score by John F. Paul, the chair of the music department at Marylhurst College. It’s a 90 minute movie (with a continuous musical score) made by the great German director F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise) which has some stunningly modern shots in spectacularly clear and evocative black and white cinematography. The score was played by violinist Inés Voglar, violist Joël Belgique, cellist Heather Blackburn, and clarinettist Dunja Marcum. The composer conducted. The score was in a contemporary, tonal language, and not at all in the style of the period, which further increased the sense of modernity and currentness of the film.

Cary Lewis

Nelly Kovalev

Anthea Kreston

Jason Duckles

On Friday night it was chamber music night. I was privileged to take part in the Dohnanyi Piano Quintet (Op. 1!) that opened the program. I was joined by Artistic Director Cary Lewis on piano, Anthea Kreston and Nelly Kovalev, violins, and Jason Duckles, cello. What a great set of collaborators they were! So much fire and spirit, and fresh and powerful musical ideas. It was a pleasure every moment to rehearse and perform with these wonderful musicians! A piece which was completely unknown to me (and I dare say everyone else in the audience, and a good many of the musicians as well) followed – a sextet for winds and piano by the Austrian composer (known mostly for his operas) Ludwig Thuille. Played by wind players from the festival orchestra, it was, as Lewis remarked before the performance “the piece Brahms would have written for woodwind quintet if Brahms had actually written a woodwind quintet.” Flutist David Buck, oboist Lindsay Edwards, clarinetist Louis Demartino, french hornist Joseph Berger, bassoonist Evan Kuhlmann, and pianist Cary Lewis played with virtuosity and sensitivity, bringing this little-known and delightful piece to life. The final work of the program was Brahms’ great and youthful string sextet in B-flat major. It is perennially irresistible in its appeal – both to performers and audiences alike – and this was yet another fine performance with stellar turns by all involved: violinists Sarah Kwak and Anthea Kreston, violists Janet Brittle and Jennifer Arnold, and cellists Sergey Antonov and Jason Duckles.

Saturday evening brought the second of two operatic bicentennials. The first weekend celebrated Richard Wagner with Act I of Die Walküre. Weekend two celebrated Verdi with an entire program of his works – opera, choral, and one of many pastiche pieces inspired by themes from his operas. The program opened with the Prelude to Act I of Il trovatore, which then segued into a work for female chorus from Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces entitled Laudi alls Vergine Maria, which is notable for its use of the composer’s ‘enigmatic scale‘. It was beautifully sung by members of the Vocal Apprentice program. Verdi’s operas were virtually overnight sensations, and the demand (in light of the fact that there were no mp3’s, CD’s, or LP’s at the time) for sheet music and other ways to reproduce the hit tunes of his operas led to countless arrangements for myriad combinations of instruments, voices, and ensembles. Husband and wife flutists extraordinaire David Buck and Jung Wan Kang were featured in the Rigoletto Fantasy, Op. 38 by Franz and Karl Doppler, which was a virtuosic romp through the primary themes from the eponymous opera. The second half of the program was given to highlights from Verdi’s penultimate opera Otello. What tremendous music this is – written after a decade of ‘retirement’ – just incredible to listen to and to play. The voices that we in the orchestra supported were also utterly amazing. The lead trio of Allan Glassman (Otello), Ruth Ann Swenson (Desdemona), and Iago (Richard Zeller) soared and whispered and fully inhabited their tragic characters. It was an honor to share the stage with them.

Sunday was the final day of the orchestra’s residency at the festival. The program was sort of a reverse image of a typical orchestral offering. We began the concert with Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony, which was then followed by the Lalo Cello Concerto (with soloist Sergey Antonov, commanding and assured as always), (conducted by Resident conductor and festival orchestra violinist Olivia Tsui), and Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with narrator David Ogden Stiers, who filled in at the last moment for the indisposed state senator Betsy Johnson. The orchestra this year was perhaps one of the best ever assembled for the festival, and it was such a pleasure to lead the superb viola section and participate with such a wonderful gathering of amazing musicians and people.

Sunset over the mouth of the Columbia River.

The beautiful Liberty Theater, home base for the festival.

Playing Dohnanyi for a host family’s cat.

One of the dozens of coffees I enjoyed in Astoria.

Lunch at the famous Bowpicker Fish and Chips.

View of the Columbia from the Astoria Column park.