Okay, here we go: my impressions of this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” Weekend 1. If you’re looking for festival background, see yesterday’s post.
One of the things I’ve always found refreshing about the Bard approach to its honored subject (this year, the chameleonic composer Bohuslav Martinů) is its mix-and-match philosophy of programming. With the exception of Saturday night concerts, for which larger forces are amassed for the duration – an orchestra, with perhaps the addition of soloists and/or a chorus – it’s not uncommon to experience instrumental, vocal, chamber, and orchestral music on the same program.
Concerts frequently push, and sometimes exceed 150 minutes. At Bard, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. There is an intermission, of course. Sometimes. This past Sunday morning’s concert ran two hours without break. It was projected to run 90 minutes.
The Friday night opener took place at Bard College’s 900-seat Sosnoff Theater, inside the Frank Gehry-designed kaiju armadillo that is the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Festival inaugural concerts always serve as introductory affairs, so we were treated to Martinů across various genres and periods.
The program commenced with Orion Weiss, a pianist whom I’ve heard at Bard pretty much every year since I first encountered him there in 2008, during “Prokofiev and His World.” That would have been my first visit to the festival, which was established in 1990. Throughout the weekend, Weiss exhibited a remarkable grasp of the Martinů idiom. For starters, he played two selections (both in F major) from the composer’s “Etudes and Polkas.” I would have liked to have heard more of these, so delectable they were. I’ve enjoyed them very much on record. But on Friday, they were mere appetizers.
As was the folk-inflected “Primrose,” a collection of five brief, though characterful songs for two voices, violin (an inspired choice on the part of the composer), and piano. This is music with roots in the soil of Moravia and shoots in the New World. The vocal duets were sung by soprano Jana McIntrye and mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven, with foundations and embellishments provided by violinist Luosha Fang and pianist Erika Switzer.
In browsing the promotional material during the weeks and months leading up to the festival, it did not register that the third work on the program, titled “Fantasia,” was indeed Martinů’s Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet, and Piano. If you don’t know the theremin, it’s that electronic instrument often used in old science fiction movies to denote UFOs and mad science. Tones are conjured and bent without physical contact by manipulating electromagnetic fields with hands held in varying proximities to the machine’s dual antennae. You have to give Martinů credit for employing this most unusual device for its musical capabilities, as opposed to gimmicky ends.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time I’ve encountered the piece. I heard it performed in 2013 by the Concordia Chamber Players with the New Jersey Symphony’s Darryl Kubian on the theremin. Granted, that was in a more intimate venue (Trinity Church in Solebury, PA), but the instrument, and by extension the work itself, made more of an impression on that occasion. That said, I must confess, despite some intriguing interplay between the theremin and the oboe, for me the piece kind of outstays its welcome. But not by much. Maybe I’m just one of those vulgarians who actually craves more mad science. On Friday, Dorit Chrysler was the thereminist. She shared the stage with oboist Alexandra Knoll, the Balourdet Quartet, and again, pianist Orion Weiss.
The first half of the concert concluded with Weiss and members of the Balourdet in a profoundly absorbing performance of Martinů’s Piano Quartet No. 1. This is a work of urgency and uncertainty that yet manages to attain real beauty with its flashes of irrepressible humanity. In my notebook, I jotted down the impression that Shostakovich might have recognized the emotional soundscape of the work’s second movement. A ray of hope appears in the third, and it occurred to me, perhaps quirkily, that Martinů’s piano passages, when he is in hopeful mode, put me in the mind, somewhat, of Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” if only in spirit. I mean that generally, not just in this piece. But Martinů is never the same for long. As it was, hope was not to continue untroubled, and peace was not guaranteed. Optimism pierced the gloom, shining sporadically, like shafts of light through clouds.
For me, this was the high-point of the program thus far, and perhaps it would have carried the evening, had it not been for the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani. Positioned as it was after interval, on top of everything else, the Double Concerto had the advantage of contrast with the smaller-scale works on the concert’s first half, which enhanced its impact enormously. As I observed in yesterday’s post, it was like the effect of having viewed a 35 mm film and then having the screen suddenly open up to the dimensions of Cinemascope.
The visual of pianist Michael Stephen Brown seated in an antiheroic position, behind the instrument, the piano perpendicular in relation to the seats in the auditorium, so that hands and keys were invisible to the audience, emphasized his neoclassical function as a musician in, as opposed to apart from, the orchestra, as in a Baroque concerto grosso. But there was nothing remotely 18th century about the content of the music, with its white hot divisi strings ratcheting up the intensity. I own several recordings of the Double Concerto, but it wasn’t until I heard it live in concert, here for the first time, that I realized what an outstanding work it truly is. Again, as I remarked yesterday, this is searing, full-bodied music that can stand toe-to-toe with the finest works of Béla Bartók. Music director Leon Botstein (also Bard’s co-artistic director) and the young musicians of The Orchestra Now, Bard’s graduate training ensemble, gave it as fine a performance as I ever expect to hear.
In the wake of this emotionally-taxing work and the staggering success of its execution, I was all set to decompress with the Symphony No. 2, one of the composer’s more carefree inspirations. It’s a piece that bears the influence of Martinů’s Czech antecedents (especially Dvorak), but also conjures the kind of wide-open positivity we associate with a lot of American music of the era. By then, 1943, Martinů was safely across the Atlantic and composing in the United States. The work was written for the Czech community of Cleveland and first performed by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.
To be fair, Botstein and his musicians had set the bar awfully high. So when the symphony commenced, my heart sank a little, as I began to suffer flashbacks to a performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony 2 these same forces had given last season at Carnegie Hall that just refused to spring to life. One of my favorite American symphonies wound up sounding like John Knowles Paine on a bad day. I feared a recurrence on Friday, with the first movement of the Martinů symphony played, to my ears, with more diffidence than such a characterful, optimistic piece should have been. It lacked forward momentum, which is not something you generally experience with this composer.
Or at least, that was my impression. Who knows. Maybe it was just me. (I HAD eaten some undercooked salmon for dinner.)
HOWEVER, I am very happy to report, things improved markedly in the second movement, which of course could handle a more relaxed tempo. The third movement, lively in its mechanized energy, was better still. It made me wonder if my reaction to the first was but “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” The last movement was exuberant, exciting, and ebullient. The performance had rebounded – possibly; again I concede that it could have been fine all along – and the work was brought to a satisfying close. Not quite on the level of the Double Concerto, mind you, but still, a job well-done.
At various points throughout the concert, Botstein offered some remarks while the stage was being reset. The man is a master of extemporization. If you’re ever looking to fill five, ten, or even thirty minutes with engaging perambulation, then Botstein is your man. A lifetime of public speaking and a devotion of one’s thoughts to interesting things will do that. Before the concert, he was presented with a framed certificate by New York Assemblymember Didi Barrett in honor of his 50 years as president of Bard College.
Apologies. This is getting long again. I’ll have to wrap it up tomorrow, likely in a more concise fashion. Otherwise, I’ll never get it all in before Weekend 2!
The Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will continue this weekend at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. For more information, visit
Fisher Center at Bard
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