Olympic festival sets music in a barn

by David Gordon Duke

We have just two weeks until Vancouver’s summer sequence of classical music festivals begins. Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, the season is already underway.

The Olympic Music Festival offers Saturday and Sunday afternoon concerts all summer just south of Port Townsend. Very much the brainchild of Alan Iglitzin, former violist of the Philadelphia String Quartet, OMF concerts take place in the barn of an old dairy farm. (I can honestly say that in a lifetime of concert going, this was the first time I’ve listened to Fauré from a hayloft.)

The site is charmingly bucolic, complete with placid donkeys for children to pet. The barn has excellent sound and great intimacy— or you can picnic and listen from outside on a gently sloping lawn. Casual is the byword: no concert dress-up for performers or audience and an absolute minimum of on-stage fuss and bother. A few of the artists are long-time regulars, but the emphasis is on a new generation of talent such as violinists Charles Wetherbee and Korine Fujiwara, and impressive young cellist Clancy Newman.

Last weekend’s program featured a pair of string quintets—teenage Mozart (his too-clever-by-half Quintet, K. 174) and an especially laid-back version of Brahms Opus 111. The highlight of the program proved to be Fauré’s lovely C minor Piano Quartet. OMF stalwart pianist (and sometime violist) Paul Hersh led an understated, worldly, and very wise reading, one that was stylish and touching by turns.

Over on the mainland, the Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival—celebrating its silver anniversary this season—is an altogether more formal affair. July concerts take place at the posh Lakeside school, perched on a rise just about the freeway at Seattle’s northern edge, where deciduous trees, tended lawns and very traditional brick architecture convincingly mimic a small East Coast college.

Monday’s season opener was filled with pre-4th of July fireworks, beginning with a flashy performance of Beethoven’s inconsequential Duet for Viola and Cello “With Two Eyeglasses Obbligato” by Cynthia Phelps (principal violist of the New York Phil) and cellist Ronald Thomas. The dud of the program was Dohnanyi’s Opus 1 Piano Quintet—rehashed leftovers in a sub-Brahmsian mode, given an overheated and indulgent performance.

Monday’s masterpiece was Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio. Finished just days before the outbreak of the First World War, the Trio manages to find a knife-edge balance between opulence and brutality. If the SCMF team didn't stress the intellectual rigour of the work, they certainly made the most of its perfumed sensuality. Violinist Carmit Zori (who’s played in the past at the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival) has a luscious tone and a wilful intensity; she was well matched by cellist Steven Doane. Earlier in the evening’s pre-concert recital, pianist Alon Goldstein delivered beautifully shaded readings of two late Schubert Impromtus. In the Ravel he more than held his own in the perplexing, contradictory piano role, one moment sparse and enigmatic, the next thundering with nihilistic prophecy.

The Vancouver Sun
5 July 2006

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