Cactus Pear Music Festival
Fresh coffee, recycled 'Seasons'
July 16, 2012In its second week, the Cactus Pear Music Festival celebrated coffee with two 18th-century cantatas devoted to the subject and then honored Bastille Day with something French, in a manner of speaking -- a bout of déjà vu.
The July 12 concert in Coker United Methodist Church had Felix Mendelssohn’s sunny Octet in E-flat for strings at its center. Leading the vibrant performance was the young violinist Bella Hristova, who impressed with her crisp rhythms, high energy and sure aim.
Flanking the Mendelssohn were two cantatas inspired by the coffee craze. Venetian merchants had introduced coffee to Italy (from Constantinople) early in the 17th century, and its popularity engulfed all of Europe by the mid-18th century. Nicholas Bernier’s “Le caffé,” published in 1711, comprises three songs and their prefatory recitatives in praise of coffee’s virtues. JS Bach’s Coffee Cantata, from the 1730s. is effectively a short comic opera about a conservative father who tries and fails to make his free-spirited daughter give up coffee and the suspect pleasures of the coffee house. The latter was staged simply and sung in a contemporary, tech-savvy translation by Jeffrey Sykes, who also wrote the excellent program notes for the entire festival.
Soprano Mary Bonhag, costumed in punk attire with purple hair, brought effortless agility and a brightly gleaming instrument to both cantatas. She displayed a particularly acute sense of rhythm, so that her recitatives in the Bernier cantata sounded as musical as the airs. Baritone Timothy Jones, always splendid in comedic roles, was delightful as the father in the Bach cantata, which also had the too-brief services of a very attractive young tenor, Sean Brabant, as the narrator and dreadlocked barista. The instrumental ensembles were stylish and lively, with especially handsome work from cellist Fred Edelen in the Bernier.
The festival’s closing concert, on July 14, was a reprise of its wildly popular 2007 finale, which drew record attendance of some 700 people. The program interleaved the individual concerti of Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” with those of Leonid Desyatnikov’s arrangement and expansion of Astor Piazzolla’s steamy “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” and Evan Premo’s four songs to poems of the seasons, for soprano and double bass. (The San Antonio Symphony also programmed the Desyatnikov/Piazzolla piece in 2010. Maybe it’s time to give it a rest.)
A tag team of violinists, each with a distinct musical personality, took the solo roles in the Vivaldi and Piazzolla works. It was fascinating to compare their differing approaches to the same idioms.
Of the four , Cactus Pear founder Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio was most attentive to the sensuality of the baroque style. She was super-sultry and insinuating in Piazzolla’s “Winter.” In Vivaldi’s “Autumn,” she brought an enticing playfulness to the opening allegro, provided some very nice ornamentation in the slow movement and found the ideal mix of robust rusticity and warmth in the finale. Most memorable, however was a single note -- the C in the staff, held for five full measures at the end of the larghetto section of the first movement over the gentle rocking of the other two violins . Ms. Sant’Ambrogio played it absolutely non-vibrato, rock-steady in pitch and timbre, and made it sound gorgeous.
Carmit Zori took furious, blazing-fast tempi in the allegros of Vivaldi’s “Winter.” In Piazzolla’s “Autumn” she was emphatic but lapidary -- an intriguing contrast to cellist Dmitri Atapine’s very open-hearted work in his extended solo. Katarzyna Bryla brought smoldering eroticism to the slow section of Piazzolla’s “Summer,” and she massaged the tempo in interesting ways in the opening movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring.” Ms. Hristova was fairly direct, interpretively. Her vibrato in Vivaldi’s “Summer” was the most pronounced of the four. She was utterly fearless in the virtuosic climax of Piazzolla’s “Spring,” and her plump tone carried loads of presence.
Ms. Bonhag returned in ravishing voice to sing Mr. Premo’s songs. The vocal lines were rooted in simple diatonic American folk styles but reached into the present with fresh, surprising contours. The bass lines, played by the composer, were jazzier, full of nervous energy that neatly complemented the singing.
Mike Greenberg
