This entire article is worth reading! With permission from American Record Guide we include the full feature as an inclusive overview of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival’s stature and ambience.
“Bliss in Puget Sound”
Melinda Bargreen, music critic for Seattle Times,
writes for American Record Guide, Nov-Dec 2006
The white ferry glides to Orcas Island through an assortment of smaller tree-covered islands that look like someone scattered a fistful of giant emeralds onto northern Puget Sound. On such late-August days, the water is as calm as glass, though there’s plenty of bustle at the departing ferry terminal in Anacortes, about a 90-minute drive north of Seattle.
Orcas Island, one of four ferry-served islands in Washington State’s San Juan Islands, has been home for the past nine years to the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival. A cozy boutique event run by founding Artistic Director Aloysia Friedmann, it’s an outgrowth of some very serendipitous circumstances. Friedmann, a violist, met her husband, pianist Jon Kimura Parker, while performing at Toby Saks’s Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival (now in it 25 th year). The couple wanted to create a junior version of the Seattle festival up on Orcas Island, where Friedmann’s parents (violinist Martin Friedmann and oboist Laila Storch) had a vacation house. They knew the arts-friendly environment of the island, which nurtures many writers, musicians, and artists. And they knew the spectacular scenery, which led to the fledgling festival’s subtitle, “Chamber Music with a View”.
Best, there were some excellent venues: the small but acoustically lively Orcas Center, whose 213 seats are perennially full, and the sanctuary of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which is perched on the rocks overlooking vistas of islands, water, and mountains.
With advice from Saks, Friedmann and a cadre of Orcas friends set forth to create a festival where the ambience is almost as great an attraction as the music. Having Parker, a Leeds Competition winner and international soloist, as the house pianist is a draw in itself; his faculty colleagues at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, including the likes of cellist Lynn Harrell, have proved a rich trove of talent from which to draw an artist lineup. More artists have come from Friedmann’s wide circle of friends at the Juilliard School and summer music camps, including trumpeter Stephen Burns and violinist Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio.
From day one, innovation has been one of the festival’s hallmarks. Over the years, Friedmann has introduced the bandoneon, alphorn, cajon, organ, and sitar as well as more traditional chamber instruments and repertoire. Distinguished film director and photographer Otto Lang gave two seasons of inspired lecture –screenings before his death last January at 98. Composer and pianist Jake Heggie appeared with mezzo-soprano Zhen Cao in his own song cycles. Two San Francisco Ballet principal dancers, Muriel Maffre and Benjamin Pierce, have created two Stravinsky dance-music-video evenings (one of them this season) that would do credit to any festival on the planet. And the artist roster has included such icons as John Mack and Claude Frank alongside William Preucil, Jeffrey Kahane, and (in a nice quid pro quo) cellist and mentor Toby Saks. During the last two weeks of August this year, happy concertgoers pile in for the pre-concert lectures and lined up at the box office, where a wait list of substantial proportions usually formed. This is a festival that’s very good to it audiences; community donors underwrite a terrific little reception after each concert with big tables of catered hors d’oeuvres, fruits, cheese, and wines. (Donors, many of them individuals, also underwrite each performer, pre-concert lecture, and concert.) Rehearsals are open to the public; a youth-involvement program works with local school music programs through the school year and brings kids to the concerts. Children are admitted free to a Family Concert, which Parker hosted this year with horn player William VerMeulen, who performed on the garden hose and funnel, alongside excerpts from main stage programming.
The four main stage concerts, each presented twice, included a nod to Mozart in every program, with repertoire ranging from the standard to the startling. In the latter category was Michael Daugherty’s 1993 Dead Elvis, where “The King” ( Benjamin Kamins, very much alive) emerged from the wings clad in a white metal-studded jumpsuit and bearing a bassoon. Daugherty’s chamber piece is a tour-de-force for any bassoonist brave enough to handle its considerable technical challenges as well as hip-swiveling ones, and Kamins made it a personal triumph, losing no opportunity to kiss women in the audience and in the onstage chamber ensemble.
On the same program was an utterly fascinating version of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, created and choreographed by Muriel Maffre, whose concept included a nearly life-size puppet soldier cunningly manipulated by her and fellow dancer Benjamin Pierce. The seven-piece chamber ensemble (with Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio leading from the violinist’s chair) played with unanimous vigor and wit, and three narrators, Adam Stern, Owen Kotler, and John Clancy – gave voice to the major characters. The extraordinary pliancy of the dancing and the effective use of the puppet (underscoring the Soldier’s puppet-like manipulations by the Devil) were enhanced by Maffre’s video images on a small screen. It was both visually and musically mesmerizing, as fresh as new paint and as exciting as a newly minted classic.
When you realize that both Dead Elvis and L’Historie du Soldat shared the same program with Poulenc’s Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone, Mozart’s Flute Sonata No. 6, and Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano, not to mention a little hors d’oeuvre in the form of Adam Stern’s new chamber transcription of Ginaster’s final dance from Estancia, you begin to understand the extraordinary creativity of this festival. Of course, there were more conventional programs. The final one, “Mozart Meets Tchaikovsky”, offered a sparking Mozart E-flat Piano Quartet with two married couples performing: Parker and Friedmann, and Lynn Harrell and his violinist wife Helen Nightengale. The second half was a supercharged Piano Trio by Tchaikovsky with Parker, Friedmann, and Harrell (Harrell, by the way, won a Grammy Award for his recording of this work).
An even smaller-scale program put Parker and Harrell together for some dream repertoire: Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, Brahms’s Cello Sonata No. 2, and Beethoven’s Seven Variations on The Magic Flute. Here were two top-flight players at their best in a duo recital of true partners, with cellist powerful enough to let pianist play at full strength in music that showed the deep commitment of both artists.
Afterward, as the blissful audience wafted into the reception room for treats and some of the festival’s reserve-label wine (bottled by Mount Baker vineyards), one audience member happily murmured, “We’re so spoiled.” Three words said it all.
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