San Francisco Classical Voice

Paul Perry

Stephen Janzen

Music festivals come in all types and sizes of course, but some of the most agreeable are the ones with lower profiles. Take "Music in the Mountains" Summer Festival of Grass Valley and Nevada City that concluded its 18th annual affair just last weekend. (Really, it's the foothills but never mind.) This festival happily goes its own way, not featuring celebrity artists to lure the large audiences necessary to meet the stars' fees, but engaging skilled musicians, mostly from the western states, and offering attractive, varied programs to a grateful community and anyone who happens to come to town and drop in.

Last Wednesday, the 15th of the festival's 17 programs (June 10-July 3) was built around the 34-piece Festival Chamber Orchestra, and very nicely. The artistic director, Paul Perry, prominent in this festival from pretty much its start, had planned an easy-listening evening. The orchestra of well-chosen personnel under his direction gave good accounts of most everything. The surprise was, for me, the least likely number, the Organ Concerto No. 1, Op. 137, in F. by Joseph Rheinberger. Since the concert venue, the Don Baggett Theater in the Nevada Union High School, boasts no pipe organ, why pick an organ concerto?

No matter. The gifted organist, Stephen Janzen, gave a solid, eminently musical performance, clean, gracefully phrased, making the electric organ talk romantic music. Rheinberger who spanned the romantic century from 1839 to 1901, was represented by a score of great warmth, melodic appeal and cogency. While pursuing a distinguished career in Munich, Rheinberger somehow managed totally to escape the influence of both Liszt and Wagner, but was knighted by Wagner's patron, King Ludwig II, anyway.

Rheinberger's music is conservative, as you would expect from an organist and pedagogue, and firmly rooted in Schumann, but it was well-made and engaging. A central notion was the orchestration, three horns, lending the sharp gutsy articulation the organ lacks, plus a string orchestra--no woodwinds. The resultant contrasts and the rhythmic design were keenly defined. Perry conducted a shapely performance that was thoroughly gratifying.

The other major work was surprising in the opposite direction. Why a young New York composer, Samuel Zyman, needed or wanted to write a Guitar Concerto, actually Concerto for Guitar and Strings, in a faux-Hispanic manner defies explanation. Commissioned for the festival by a member of the community and for the soloist, Dennis Koster, Zyman's Concerto was terribly conventional, and conventionally terrible.

The idiom of the orchestral writing started in early 20th-century England, changing in the finale to a somewhat disjunct, syncopated manner that the orchestra was hard put to hold together. Included were a couple of fugal attempts that broke off early. The soloist's part used every Spanish guitaristic cliche in the book, as if it were not possible to write interesting music for the instrument without those twirls, scrubbings, gruppetti, turns, cutely popped harmonics and the like. Koster did decently with it, but truth to tell, the piece didn't even offer a virtuosic challenge. In fact both the big guitar solo and the cadenza in the first movement, were so discontinuous as to bring the music to a virtual stop.

More flattering to the evening's effort and the assembled talent were the works that framed the program. Bartok's popular Rumanian Folk Dances, neatly done, provided a cheery opening. The finale was a showy setting of the Gloria of the mass by the British composer John Rutter, for chorus, brass ensemble and percussion. It's a peppy trick, an easy dazzler that enjoys ejaculating the familiar short Latin phrases in jazzy syncopations. With bright and shiny interjections of the brass, it goes over like gang busters.

It was a good touch and symbolic to end with the choral work cleanly and firmly performed by the Festival Chorale of over 70 singers. It recognizes the fine choral tradition in Grass Valley and Nevada City, cultivated by such exceptional teachers as Marian Libbey and Don Baggett. If the youth in this community today is not as engaged in singing--and the maturity of the Chorale members didn't suggest otherwise--at least those from an earlier time were up there keeping it alive until the cultural and educational pendulum swings. Music In The Mountains should help that process along.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©1999 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved