Annas Bay Music Festival: Martha Graham, an American Legend and Opera à la Carte; various artists, conducted by Jerrod Wendland and Huw Edwards; 01.09.2006 and 04.09.2006 (BJ)

 

 

Across Puget Sound from Seattle, nestled in the lee of the awe-inspiring Olympic Mountains, lies the misleadingly named Hood Canal. “Hood” may be appropriate enough, for it commemorates an early traveler in this region, but “Canal” scarcely does justice to this majestic body of water, actually an inlet of the sea well over a mile wide for most of its more than 30-mile length. Its southern shore is lined by waterfront houses from whose aspect you would not guess that the occupants have to wonder where their next meal is going to come from.

Until recently, however, they might well have been at a loss for cultural sustenance. But that seems set to change, for a new music festival has just been unveiled at Harmony Hill, a cancer retreat just outside the town of Union. In the newly built–in fact not yet fully completed–Elmer & Katharine Nordstrom Great Hall, which can accommodate up to 150 people in a variety of flexible configurations, an Oktoberfest exploring German Romanticism and a “festival of enlightenment” focusing largely on 18th-century music are planned for later this year. Meanwhile, I attended two of the programs featured in an inaugural “celebration of American music” under the title “Of Thee We Sing”–and found the standard of planning, presentation, and performance astonishingly high.

A concert in tribute to the dancer and dance-animator Martha Graham offered works by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, William Schuman, and Aaron Copland. Griffes was represented by a set of Three Tone Pictures composed between 1912 and 1919, Schuman by Night Journey, his 1947 treatment of the Oedipus myth, and Copland by his perennially popular Appalachian Spring, heard on this occasion in its original 1944 chamber-orchestra scoring. The juxtaposition of the Schuman and Copland works was especially illuminating. My own feeling has long been that Schuman, not Copland, was really the preeminent American symphonist of his time, and the dark, rigorously organized, and powerfully atmospheric music of Night Journey is typical in some ways of his creative vitality. But Schuman was at his best on the broad canvas of the symphonic medium, and in the less formally demanding medium of ballet Copland’s accessibility, and indeed his sheer affability, worked in his favor, so that Appalachian Spring made an aptly climactic conclusion for an evening that had begun with Griffes’s well-crafted late-romantic miniatures.

What helped to make the experience genuinely riveting for the audience was the quality of the performance by the South Shore Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble gathered from among some of the area’s best instrumentalists, under the baton of Jerrod Wendland. Quite aside from his consistently insightful interpretation of three widely disparate scores, so assured, unobtrusive, and economical was his technique that I was astonished to learn after the event that the concert was his public debut as a conductor.

No less impressive, three days later, was the leadership of Huw Edwards, a native of Wales who currently directs orchestras in Olympia, Washington’s state capital, and in Portland, Oregon. He conducted a double-bill of American operas comprising Bon Appétit and A Water Bird Talk, respectively by Lee Hoiby and Dominick Argento, and met the acoustical challenge of balancing solo voices with a sizable instrumental ensemble with exemplary discretion. Effectively staged by Claudia Zahn on a set by Tim McMath, with costumes by Melanie Burgess and lighting by Jeremy Winchester, the two one-act and essentially one-character pieces presented a satisfying sequence of expression from the lightheartedness of Bon Appétit, which is nothing more or less than a music version of the recipe for chocolate cake from Julia Child’s celebrated television cooking show, The French Chef, to the intense mortification of Argento’s henpecked and embittered lecturer. The orchestra again played splendidly. Kathryn Weld was charming If surprisingly blond) as the often clumsy but always endearing Julia. And as the lecturer in Argento’s fine short opera the baritone Robert Orth yielded nothing to my memories of John Shirley-Quirk’s realization of the role at an Aldeburgh Festival performance back in 1983. Orth charted the poor man’s frequent shifts between naive enthusiasm and sheer hateful fury impeccably (fueled every now and then by offstage interjections by Lorraine Burdick as his shrewish wife), and the audience for its part revolved by turns between moments of hilarity and, in the end, profound sad sympathy.

The festival’s organizers are general director Matthew Melendez Blegen, Wendland as director of instrumental music, company manager Theresa Jacobson (no relation of mine, I should observe), and Gary D. Cannon, director of the festival’s chamber choir, which I heard with pleasure at an introductory event a few weeks earlier. They can be proud of the organization they have put together in the course of less than a year’s preparation. Sponsors including the local Alderbrook Properties, an evidently ardent group of volunteers, and an enthusiastic board led by president Mary Penney and vice president Richard T. Hoss have come together to create one of the most interesting and promising festivals to be found anywhere, and I look forward to reporting on its further progress with the liveliest anticipation.

 

 

Bernard Jacobson