Summers are an interesting time for musicians – whether they are in a full 52 week orchestra, freelance performers, or members of orchestras that play less than 52 weeks each season. The Oregon Symphony plays 40 weeks a year – leaving 12 weeks where we find work where we can. 52 week orchestras often have brief vacation periods before and after their summer seasons (which they get paid for). Anyway, that’s the preamble. Some of us in the OS save carefully to make it through the furlough weeks, some take on summer festival gigs, some collect unemployment benefits, and some do a combination of all of these things. I think it’s important to know what the financial situations are of OS musicians – it’s part of what makes us who we are, and determines what projects we take on outside of the orchestra and during the summer furlough months.
During my summers over the years I’ve done most of the things mentioned above. As I’ve done more and more orchestral playing, I’ve found that it’s been vital to keep a healthy dose of chamber music in the mix, both within the season and outside of it. This summer I took part in two chamber music festivals. One of them was only my second season as a participant, and the other was my eighth season. For the first time in almost two decades, I took time away from the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. It’s all orchestral music (for the most part) and a lot of my colleagues play there, so it felt right to take a time out and just concentrate on the chamber music. With all that out of the way (so much ado!) I’ll take a moment to tell you what my summer has been like this year.
In mid-June the Chintimini Chamber Music Festival presents four concerts in 10 days in the Corvallis area. Corvallis is the home of Oregon State University, and as such has all of the usual amenities of a university town. In the summer it’s remarkably quiet, and its surrounding area is a playground for anyone who is interested in activities that involve two-wheeled, human-powered vehicles. Chamber music and cycling? Sign me up! It was a whirlwind starting the festival, beginning with leaving the house at 7am to drive down to my first rehearsal (right after a 45th Parallel concert the night before).
It was all worthwhile when my friends Anthea Kreston, Fritz Gearhart and Jason Duckles got to dig into the massive and, dare I say, chronically underplayed String Quartet No. 1 in C minor by Johannes Brahms. Brahms’ quintets, sextets and piano quartets all get quite a bit of love on the festival circuit, but the three string quartets, though beloved by musicians, don’t get a much of a hearing by audiences. It’s too bad! The C minor quartet is a challenging piece by any reckoning, and it also takes a lot of energy to perform – it’s around 35 minutes in length, and it never lets up for a moment. Along with the Brahms on that first concert was a piece by adopted Oregonian Ernest Bloch that I hadn’t known about before the festival – his Prelude for String Quartet, which is a lovely piece (maybe part of a planned larger whole?) that very much deserves to be heard – and the fact that it starts with the viola (and instrument that Bloch, like Brahms, loved) doesn’t hurt, in my opinion!
There were two more concerts that I took part in and had a terrific time with all of the musicians, most of whom I hadn’t really had the opportunity to work with before coming to the Chintimini Festival. Most noteworthy were a mixed wind/string piece called Conversations by Arthur Bliss and Darius Milhaud’s String Quartet No. 1. Both were delightful and heretofore completely unknown to me! Go to the festival’s YouTube channel to find the entire range of performances from this summer’s festival.
There was a little bit of respite between Chintimini and my other festival of the summer, the Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival. That will come in part two of this roundup!
