Crowds Flock to Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival
The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival is off to an auspicious start with two concerts of contrasting music that drew and delighted capacity audiences.
On July 29, a beautiful, 80-plus-degree evening, the festival kicked off its 32nd season with an outdoor concert of summery impressionistic music. An estimated 300 people sitting under a large tent and another 500 or so, many with picnics, spread out on folding chairs or blankets on the lawn of the Bridgehampton Museum, heard strains of late-18th-century and early-19th-century France. The annual event was offered as a free gift to the community, with the support of the Bridgehampton National Bank.
There were many veterans of the festival in attendance, but for first-time visitors, Marya Martin, its artistic director, said the evening was meant to offer “a taste of who we are, what we play, and what we do.” The program was appropriately called “Enchanté,” as in “pleased to meet you,” and throughout the evening listeners could not help but see and hear the word as meaning “enchanted” as well.
The composers represented — Roussel, Fauré, Ravel, Debussy, and to a lesser extent Saint-Saens — developed a style in reaction to the culmination of German Romanticism, which they saw as heavy, formal, and oversized. Their music became lighter, freer in form, more poetic, more sensuous and fantasy-like.
Seven outstanding instrumentalists appeared during the concert in various combinations: Ms. Martin on flute, Romie de Guise-Langlois on clarinet, Bridget Kibbey on harp, and a string quartet made up of Kristin Lee (making her debut festival appearance), Amy Schwartz Moretti, Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu, and Nicholas Canellakis.
The repertoire was a perfect fit for the setting. The Allegro from Roussel’s “Serenade for Flute, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Harp” was wispy and fanciful. An elegant combination of two instruments and players was featured in the “Fantaisie for Violin and Harp” by Saint-Saens, and the rendition was impassioned and virtuosic. In three transcriptions of Debussy’s shorter works all seven instruments were heard, an ideal combination for the composer’s pastel colorings. It was especially good to hear the warm, full tones of the clarinet in a solo role.
Fauré’s “Sicilienne for Cello and Harp” featured another lovely combination, and I enjoyed the full-bodied cello coming to the fore. The evening closed with Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet, and Strings,” again with all seven players on the stage, with the textures sounding much fuller and more orchestral.
Although the weather was pleasant enough, the heat and humidity could have presented challenges for the performers as well as their instruments, which can be finicky under such circumstances, but these adverse conditions did not seem to be a problem. Playing in the dry acoustics of an outdoor tent (with a tasteful modicum of amplification) is also less satisfying and more challenging for musicians than playing in the fine acoustics of their usual venue, but nevertheless the nuances, articulations, and subtleties came across quite well.
There was occasional noise from cars, trucks, and motorcycles on Montauk Highway that apparently did not distract the players but, unfortunately, a few times did cover up a beautiful quiet passage.
By contrast to the enchantment of the first program, the concert on Sunday, featuring the music of Bach and Mendelssohn, was solid, formidable, and brilliant. The program, at the festival’s usual venue, the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, drew a sold-out crowd. In fact, extra chairs were placed at the front, stage left, and in the back.
Sunday’s performance brought together Ms. Martin, Ms. Lee, Ms. Moretti, Ms. Chu, Mr. Canellakis, Jeffrey Beecher on double bass, and Kenneth Weiss on harpsichord for Bach’s Suite No. 2 in B minor. Consisting of an overture followed by six contrasting dance movements, the music was sprightly, clear, well balanced, and elegant, giving a feeling that all is right with the world. The last movement was a breathtaking tour de force for the flute that was masterfully played.
In Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D major, Mr. Weiss played the virtuoso solo part impeccably, with artistry and mastery, and the sound of the harpsichord was quite charming and engrossing.
However, a question for performers playing baroque music is, do you play it on modern instruments or period instruments? In this case, the harpsichord was one modeled after the smaller, delicate baroque sound, while the five string instruments were the fuller, richer, and more dynamic modern instruments that we are used to. So, to my ears the strings, while sensitively played, overpowered the sound of the harpsichord. (Often the piece is played on a modern piano, and called, anachronistically, a piano concerto.)
One solution might have been to have the harpsichord placed in front of the strings rather than behind them, so its sound might have come out more.
Closing the program was Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings. Written when he was only 16, it is an amazingly mature work with great imagination and originality. The second movement, Andante, played in such consummate and artistic hands, had a breathtaking range of emotion and expression. In the closing two movements, each player in turn had demanding and exacting passages, played with a dazzling, edge-of-the-seat intensity that brought the audience to its feet at the end.
The festival continues through Aug. 23, highlighting the great and beloved composers and repertoire combined with a good mix of the new and different. Here are a few unusual items coming up:
A new piece that is a tribute to the late comedian Robin Williams will be premiered at the church on Sunday, at 6:30 p.m. It was written by Kevin Puts, who won a Pulitzer Prize in music in 2012 for his opera “Silent Night.” “Rounds for Robin” is scored for flute and piano, and is “at turns impish, florid, rhapsodic, and brooding,” according to the composer.
Mr. Puts has been featured often on B.C.M.F. programs, and the latest CD on the festival’s own label is entirely of his music.
A recent composition by Mohammed Fairouz commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches as well as the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, called “Deep Waters,” will be heard at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Monday at 6:30 p.m. Mr. Fairouz is an Arab-American composer involved with major social issues who seeks to promote cultural communication and understanding, according to his website. He has had commissions from a number of leading orchestras and chamber ensembles, and blogs about “the intersection of arts and international affairs” for The Huffington Post. The all-American program includes Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin.
And, on Aug 14, Stravinsky and — Pink Floyd? Almost. The Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters, who Ms. Martin called “one of the great poets of all time of rock music,” and who has a house in Bridgehampton, has adapted and updated the narrator’s part of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” to “breathe contemporary life into the text,” according to a release. The piece, for narrator and a septet of instruments, is based on a Russian folk tale about a fiddle-playing soldier and his encounters with the devil. Mr. Waters will be the narrator for the performance, which is the annual Wm. Brian Little Concert, named for the late B.C.M.F. board member and dedicated this year to the memory of Walter Channing. The concert will take place in the sculpture garden of the Channing Daughters Winery in Bridgehampton. Tickets cost $100, $150 for reserved seating
There is much more about the programs as well as ticket information at bcmf.org or 537-6368. There are seven more concerts left in the series; I would think that serious music-lovers would be eager to get their fill of the finest.