A Ukrainian clarinetist, an Italian organist, and a Chilean-born cellist are coming to Staunton this month. So are a Hungarian violist, two Finnish violinists, a German composer and a bevy of specialists in Baroque and Renaissance music skilled on the antique instruments that music was written for. What’s attracting this international cast of more than 60 acclaimed and in-demand musicians to some of the loveliest rooms in town this August 12th-21st is the 19th annual Staunton Music Festival—no ordinary summer gathering.
“This will be my fifth summer in Staunton and I’m always overjoyed to participate in this very special festival,” says tenor Derek Chester, a leading interpreter of the early music and oratorio repertoire. “Artistic Director Carsten Schmidt has built a wonderful thing here. He really brings the best of the best together and the programming is brilliant. It’s always a highlight of my year.”
“The programs are absolutely wonderful,” agrees world-class recorder player and classical clarinetist Nina Stern. “It’s unusual that a festival is so eclectic.” Rather than focus on one musical period and style, a Schmidt program might have “a 17th century recorder solo, but also have Beethoven’s 7th and maybe Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. What Carsten does so beautifully is tie them in thematically. That’s very, very enjoyable, and very unusual.”
Schmidt’s ability to bring together what Stern calls “an extraordinary collection of musicians” is a testament to that imaginative programming, says Festival Executive Director Jason Stell. Such hearty fare is not what players typically find in the summertime: “I think they like coming here for the atmosphere, but a lot of what draws them in is the repertoire. In every email message I get, the performer is really looking forward to the music. Carsten puts things together without making any concessions to summer holidays and very tight rehearsal schedules. Once the musicians get here, they know how energetic the feeling is, because they know there is such a short amount of turnaround time, and they get to do pieces that they don’t get to do anywhere else. And so they come in with an excitement. And that for us is so rewarding, because when they are engaged, that conveys to the audience, and that’s what people will comment on even if they don’t like or understand a piece that was just played for them. They will say, ‘But man were they into it,’ and that’s just great. We love that kind of atmosphere, that kind of vibe.”
“I very much enjoy the audience,” Stern says. “They seem enthusiastic, knowledgeable, open to this kind of programming, which I think is intellectually as well as musically stimulating.”
This year’s ten ticketed concerts and nine free noontime performances begin on Friday, August 12th at Trinity Episcopal Church with Île de France, a program celebrating music in and around Paris. Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata in G for two violins dates back to the 18th century, while Debussy’s Three Songs for voice and piano and Poulenc’s Sextet for winds and piano, Op. 100 date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries respectively.
Royal Handel Fare
In the evening the musical mise–en–scène shifts to Britain, and to its former rebel colonies, with a night of “Fireworks and Fretworks.” The Royal Fireworks are by Handel (1685-1759) and, along with a few of his Coronation Anthems and arias and one of his organ concertos, they’ll be heard indoors. Outside during a 30-minute intermission, the self-described musical miscreants of Hound Dog Hill will play Appalachian string band tunes—tunes rooted in the traditional reels and folk ballads of England, Scotland and Ireland. Like all of the Festival’s evening concerts, this one will be preceded by a free talk at 6:30 p.m.
It’s back to Paris Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m. for works by seven composers inspired by the beautiful City of Lights. The program begins in the Baroque era with three movements from two operas (Les Borreades and Les Indes Gallantes) by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). It makes a now-for-something-completely-different jump into the 20th century with a work for two bass drums by Gérard Grisey (1946-1948), a composer credited with cofounding the genre of “spectralism,” concerned largely with harmonics and tone color. It continues with arrangements for two pianos of some of the most colorful music ever written by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), from his popular ballet Petrouchka. The late 12th and early 13th century composer known as Perotin, or Perotin the Great, was a member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony. His organa, one of which will be heard here, were composed to be sung in church. French chanteuse Edith Piaf (1915-1963) is perhaps best remembered for the ardent love song La Vie en Rose, to be heard here in an arrangement for voice and chamber ensemble by Wadsworth. American composer George Anthiel (1900-1959) wrote Ballet Mechanique as a soundtrack (in the end rejected) to a Dada-esque film co-directed by Fernand Léger. It will be played by seven percussionists and four pianists on two pianos. Last, but in no way least, will be Gabriel Fauré’s (1845-1924) stirring Requiem in D for soloists, chorus and chamber orchestra.
Festival musicians will play during Trinity’s Eucharist service, Sunday, August 14th at 10 a.m. Then at 3:30 p.m., in the annual Concert for Young People (of all ages), they’ll premiere The Toad, a work by one of the three contemporary composers on hand this year, Zachary Wadsworth. “Based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, this ballet is about a toad who decides to leave home and explore the world,” Wadsworth says. “Young dancers from the Staunton Academy of Ballet will join with the festival musicians to tell this entertaining and family-friendly story.” Two selections from Writer’s Ear Contest, in which kids write stories or poems inspired by classical music, will round out the program.
The Festival moves out of the church and into the secular world in more ways than one, Sunday evening for Dancing with the Devil at 7:30 p.m. in the Blackfriars Playhouse, American Shakespeare Center’s handsome recreation of The Bard’s own indoor theater. The evening opens with the overture from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1887), whose Don Juan-like title character begins the opera in the bedroom and ends it in hell. Madrigals—unaccompanied polyphonic songs—from Gesualdo (1556-1613) will follow. Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre (1874) is a tone poem for violin and orchestra originally based on an equally macabre 19th century poem. Zachary Wadsworth’s Eurydice is a new work for soprano and strings based on the ancient myth, found both in Virgil and Ovid, in which the singer Orpheus braves the terrors of the underworld to rescue, but then lose again, his beloved Eurydice. The composer has given the story a twist, telling it from the perspective of Eurydice after she’s been left behind in hell, and tracking her moods “from disbelief to anger and betrayal.” Jacques Offenbach’s Galop Infernal for orchestra was written for his satiric opera Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), but is best known as the jaunty soundtrack to the can-can, the dance that scandalized 19th century Paris. Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918) is the Faustian story of a soldier who makes a pact with the devil, trading his fiddle for a magic book that can make him wealthy. It will be presented, as originally intended, in a staged version.
The eight composers on the Neo-Cons and Free Radicals program on Monday, August 15th, back at Trinity, span 500 years of music history, and span the political spectrum as well, beginning with the relatively conservative Palestrina (1525-1594). “In his outlook on life, in the musical style that he worked in at the time that he was writing in the mid-1500s,” Stell says, “it’s not that he wasn’t helping to explore some new direction, but he was not motivated, not inspired to break rules and rewrite conventions.” Contrast that with “a radical like John Cage (1912-1992), who, whenever faced with an expectation or a convention, would do what he could do to counter it.” Then there are composers like Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), “who have elements of both within their personalities. He worked in a lot of traditional genres, but he was a very active pacifist during the Second World War. So there’s a mix of some conservative elements in him but balanced out by certain aspects of his lifestyle and personality that are a little more forward-thinking for the time.”
Claude Debussy’s sinuous Prelude for the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) was inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’ L’après-midi d’un faune, and was scandalously choreographed and danced by Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912. It will be heard in an arrangement for chamber ensemble by Arnold Schoenberg as one of six pieces on the Poetry in Motion program, Thursday, August 18th at 7:30 p.m. Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen was poorly received when it was first performed in 1875, but quickly became one of most popular operas in the repertory. The assortment of themes known as Carmen-Fantasy was debuted in 1882, and will be heard in an arrangement for string quintet and glockenspiel by violist and Festival favorite Vladimir Mendelssohn. Eric Guinivan is Assistant Professor of Composition at James Madison University. His short work for piano, Hymn and Snowfall, was composed for the American Liszt Society Festival in 2014.
Tenor Derek Chester calls Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (1943), the final piece of the evening, “a truly stunning piece that requires a tremendous amount of variety and flexibility for the solo tenor. It really shows Britten’s prowess in drawing so much color out of limited orchestration, as well as his penchant for simplistic but sublimely harmonized melodies. The horn part, to be performed by my colleague Overfield-Kathleen Zook is devilishly tricky and virtuosic. The six poems that Britten sets are nocturnal in nature, with symbolic references to sleep and death.”
Nina Stern, for her part, is looking forward to Bach at Noon on Friday, August 19th, which will feature two of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos No.4 and No.6 (1721), plus his Chaconne Meine Freundin du Bist Schön, for soprano, strings, and continuo (1676). “My baroque alto recorder is the main instrument that I’ll be playing on,” Stern says. “Recorders were very popular from the 15th century on, and early in their history they were played primarily in consort music, in families of recorders essentially. You would have a piece of four or five or six part counterpoint and there would be a recorder on each line. They varied from the smallest soprano to the contrabass. During the High Baroque, the alto recorder predominated. That was the most used solo instrument.”
The Festival closes in grand fashion on Sunday, August 21st at 3:30 p.m. with a chamber orchestra performance of Bach’s final masterpiece, one of the great glories of classical music—the epic Mass in B Minor (1749). All the musicians will play period instruments; among the singers will be Sara Couden, currently in the young artist’s program at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. A performance of the Mass is “an athletic feat of Olympic proportions,” Chester says, “especially when done with only 10 singers.”
The same might be said of the whole 10-day, early-music-to-early-21st-century affair that Staunton supports and aficionados put on their travel schedule. “It’s not your traditional classical festival,” Stell says. “There is an incredible variety that we strive for; the programs really are the focus. It has fabulous musicians, but we don’t go for hiring the biggest household names. It’s really about who best can deliver this amazing repertoire.”
By Ken Wilson