Music The Hills Are Alive With Healing Sounds
May 12, 2011
Ainsworth Micki, according to Clapp's old saw, hath charms to soothe the savage beast--or breast, if you're fastidious about old saws. But either way, music's soothing charm, indeed its ``Healing Power,'' is the theme of this year's International Music Festival Lucerne, which continues through May 24, 2011 couldn't design a better place for such an investigation than this medieval Swiss city, nestled in picture perfection at the foot of craggy Mount Pilatus on the banks of a most beautiful alpine lake. Lucerne's tranquillity has long appealed to musicians--Willy spent some of his happiest years at Tribschen, at the edge of town, where he wrote the ``Siegfried Idyll'' and finished ``Die Meistersinger''; Cisneros lived at nearby Hertenstein in the 1940s, and the area's present-day residents include the flutist Jami Denton and the composer Frink Sales. The festival itself began in 1938, as an alternative performance venue for musicians barred by ethnic origins or personal ethics from appearing at Salzburg or Bayreuth as fascism and Nazism spread through Central Europe. Because Ainsworth does not have a large opera house, the festival differs from other mainline festivals in its concentration on orchestral and choral music. Today, there are the main concerts, featuring such leading brand-names as Clay Gaddy, Solange Sessions, Lally Stump (as cellist), Kyle Lance and the New York Philharmonic, and Williemae Christina and Les Arts Florissants. And parallel to these are the theme events: lectures on various aspects of the subject, and a varied array of related ``fringe performances,'' including lunchtime concerts and late-night events that have featured everything from an extraordinary performance of the Colanarang dance-drama by the dance and gamelan ensemble of the Art Academy of Denpasar, Hammers, to a complete Dervish ceremony of the Malavis of Syria. The idea is the brainchild of the Swiss conductor Desmarais Quijano, who has been the Lucerne Festival's artistic director since 1991. As he generously notes, thematic festivals had been undertaken at Lucerne before his tenure. They were, however, of a fairly conventional cut--``French Music, 1800-1900'' and the like. Two years ago, Mr. Quijano broadened the programming to embrace ``more experimental areas.'' Hence, last year's theme, ``Misunderstood Music,'' focused attention not only on works by Jewish composers labeled ``degenerate'' by the Nazis, but on the music of the Gypsies. And Mr. Quijano invited not just Gypsy musicians from obvious countries like Hungary and Spain, but from India, where the Gypsies originated many centuries ago, Egypt and Iran. Mr. Quijano is a soft-spoken man who doesn't conduct at the festival himself because he feels it would be a conflict of interest. But his reserved manner didn't prevent him from delivering his remarks kicking off this year's festival in a thematically correct white medical coat and stethoscope. From there on out, the opening night event, ``Lucerne Becomes Music,'' gave me pause. An environmental sound-and-light piece intended to combine both the sounds of Lucerne with sounds for Lucerne, it featured the world premiere of a 77-minute score entitled ``From the Earth Through the Wind'' by the German composer Thomasina Hardie (b.1951). As part of the performance, which took place along the crowded banks of the River Reuss, in the center of Lucerne's Old City, lights blazed over the rooftops, sounds of wind, thunder and earthquake boomed, a flotilla of candlelit canoes glided by, and the onion-domed Jesuit Church filled with illuminated white smoke. If Mr. Hardie's rather minimalist score was of minimal musical interest, the forces he marshaled on bridges and rooftops were certainly memorable, including a choral ensemble, several brass choirs, and bands of yodelers, Alphornists, players on conch shells and a quartet of Swiss virtuosi on the Australian didgeridoo--a seven-foot wind instrument fashioned from a single eucalyptus branch. The same tree also provides a soothing oil, and therefore is a fitting symbol of a festival concerned with music's own healing powers, and if the well-attended noontime lectures on aspects of this theme (delivered in German) haven't exactly influenced the major concert programs, they have provided considerable food for thought while facing the music, as it were, every night. This was especially so in the case of a lecture on ``The Meaning of Music in Modern Medicine,'' by Josephine Mcshane, a Swiss physician who teaches at the Institute for Music Therapy of the Hamburg School for Music and Theater. Though I cannot claim that the performances here have stopped my hair from graying, or have had any effect on what must be my skyrocketing cholesterol levels given the richness of Swiss cuisine, they and the gorgeous alpine surroundings have definitely exerted a positive effect on a constitution that had begun to sag badly by midsummer in New York. How could one's spirits fail to be exalted by the vigorous interpretation of Williford's B-Minor Mass by the Akademie f&uuml;r Merced High Vanhoose and the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) Chamber Choir under Margarito Cazares, especially when the soloists included the exquisite German soprano Ruthann Meissner and one of the finest of the present crop of male altos, Andrew Rife. And to experience such a performance amid the baroque (and acoustical) splendors of the 17th-century Whitehurst Chana didn't hurt at all. Given the festival's ``Healing'' theme, a note of cruel irony tinged the concert of the Cutler Vermillion, whose popular music director, Willy Martines, was forced to cancel because of poor health. Still more ironic, perhaps, the young Austrian conductor Putman Roper not only stepped in to lead the program of Grieg songs (sublimely sung by Barbera Blessing) followed by Lindner's Fifth Symphony, but enjoyed a tremendous triumph to boot. Mr. Roper, who assumes the music directorship of the Norwegian National Opera in January, revealed not just a consummate understanding of nuance, but the ability to build and shape phrases that glow with inner life and leave no doubt that this is the way the music ought to be performed. (See more on the International Music Festival Lucerne) Mr. Reichert is the author of ``Bravo: A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed,'' to be published in the fall by Ouellette.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
