Cactus Pear Music Festival
The cat's meow, and other delights
July 19, 2011The Cactus Pear Music Festival’s second week brought dispatches from some of the byways of the Romanic period, loosely speaking, on July 14, and a mostly-baroque concluding program on July 16. Both were in the suburban Coker United Methodist Church.
Except for the remarkably able participants in the festival’s Young Artist Program, who played a new work by young West Texas composer Harlan Hodges on the July 16 concert, the musicians were visiting from distant (and mostly cooler) climes. Among said cooler climes was Reno, Nevada, current home of the festival’s founder and artistic director, former San Antonio Symphony concertmaster Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio. While San Antonio was wilting in the upper 90s, the high temperatures in Reno were in the low 80s.
The music on the two concerts ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. The latter category proved more congenial to my heat-addled brain, though high-minded readers are welcome to disagree.
Atop the ridiculous heap, on July 14, was Francois Borne’s “Carmen” Fantasy for flute and piano, an absurdly florid profiterole loosely tethered to tunes from Georges Bizet’s opéra comique. Some of the variations sounded like they required the services of two or three (or seven) brilliant, perfectly coordinated flutists, but only one was visible -- the astonishing Lorna McGhee, newly appointed principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony. Her excellent partner was Canadian pianist Ryo Yanagitani, gold medalist in the 2009 San Antonio International Piano Competition.
The baroque program, not to be outdone in fizz, included a delicious parade of sonic animal caricatures in the form of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Sonata Representativa for violin and basso continuo. Ms. Sant’Ambrogio was splendid in the demanding solo part -- her importunately meowing cat and musketeer mosquitoes were especially annoying -- and she was backed by the magnificent continuo team of cellist Fred Edelen (former principal cellist of the San Antonio Symphony, now assistant principal cello with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam) and harpsichordist Christina Edelen.
Ms. Edelen’s impeccable and consistently interesting continuo work was most clearly audible in J.S. Bach’s Sonata in E for flute and basso continuo, with Ms. McGhee and Mr. Edelen. The performance was crisp and stylish all around. C.P.E. Bach’s Trio Sonata in A for flute, violin and basso continuo benefited from taut, responsive playing by Ms. McGhee, Ms. Sant’Ambrogio, Mr. Yanagitani and Mr. Edelen.
The baroque concert opened and closed with music by relatively little-known composers who deserve wider hearing. Giovanni Battista Fontana was represented by the Sonata No. 16 for three violins and basso continuo, which recalls the style of his contemporary Monteverdi. From late in the 17th century came Georg Muffat’s “Armonico Tributo” Sonata No. 4 for strings and harpsichord, with many arresting moments.
The Romantic program opened with a warm, animated account of Puccini’s elegiacal “Chrysanthemums” for string quartet. Mahler’s very early Piano Quartet in A Minor was played with poise but too much caution, except for Mr. Yanagitani’s robust work on piano.
Mr. Yanagitani impressed again with his big, fluid and consistently musical playing in Ernst von Dohnanyi’s early Piano Quintet No. 1, which sounded much like Brahms, but without the mastet's compositional discipline. Violist Dave Harding projected a fetchingly sultry sound in the sweet, long-lined melody that opens the slow movement. Their top-drawer colleagues were violinists Dmitri Pogorelov and Katarzyna Bryla and cellist Aron Zelkowicz.
Ms. McGhee shone again in the Nocturne and Scherzo for flute and string quartet by the unjustly obscure American composer Arthur Foote. The sophistication and well-managed complexity of this music, dating from 1919, indicated a composer worthy of much wider notice.
This year the festival selected five high-school-age musicians for the Young Artist Program -- violinist Rachel Roberts, violist Nathan Dowling, cellist McKinley Glasser, flutist Mattie Kotzur and pianist Ellen Pavliska. Mr. Hodges composed his”Visions of a Mockingird” for that contingent. The piece packs moments of sensuous Impressionism, tough modernism and a sweet, Gershwinesque jazz sensibility into a five-minute frame. It didn’t hang together particularly well on first hearing, but Mr. Hodges clearly showed some chops worth developing. The performance was quite strong.
Minus Ms. Lotzur, the young musicians returned to play the Rondo alla Zingarese from Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G Minor -- spirited and demanding music, played with skill and verve.
Mike
Greenberg
