Just as Santa Fe’s summer classical music season is winding down, things are heating up to the north, thanks to Music from Angel Fire. Its two-week season features some impressive players and adventurous repertory, with performances in Raton and Taos as well as Angel Fire, running from Thursday, August 15-28.
Violinist Ida Kavafian served as the group’s first artistic director from 1984 to 2019. She was succeeded in the role by the duo of flutist Tara Helen O’Connor and violinist Daniel Phillips, both well known to Santa Fe audiences from their many performances with the chamber music festival here.
“All artistic decisions and the visions for the festival theme, programs, and artists each year are done jointly,” Phillips says. “Tara keeps us organized and also has the pulse of who the finest contemporary composers are.”
Phillips launches the 2024 season with a Polonaise by Henryk Wieniawski, a celebrated 19th-century violin virtuoso and composer whose works were written to showcase his skills. O’Connor and cellist Natasha Brofsky follow with Heitor Villa-Lobos’ The Jet Whistle, a 1950 composition named after its final movement, in which the flutist uses a special playing technique to imitate a jet plane taking off.
O’Connor and Wendy Chen, resident pianist for the 2024 festival, play “Vesper Flight” by Kenji Bunch, one of three works by the contemporary American composer on the Music from Angel Fire season. (See “A Bunch of notes” sidebar for more about Bunch.) “Vesper Flight” was commissioned by O’Connor as a memorial to her recently deceased parents and was first performed in 2021.
Violinist Daniel Phillips is co-artistic director of Music from Angel Fire.
Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos
The program closes with Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor, one of two pieces in the genre he wrote almost simultaneously around 1861. It was more revolutionary in its form and style than its A Major companion quartet, which led to its relative neglect for some time. Now it’s highly regarded, with commentator Donald Francis Tovey opining that “the first movement is one of the most original and impressive tragic compositions since the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
6 p.m. Thursday, August 15; Taos Center for the Arts; $50-$55
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If you’d like to know more about how the chamber music sausage is made, especially without the involvement of a conductor, the festival’s open rehearsal is your opportunity to eavesdrop on the process.
11 a.m. August 16; Angel Fire Community Center; Free
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Composer Gabriel Fauré
Pianist Chen launches the group’s second concert with a prelude and three etudes by Frédéric Chopin, after which Phillips joins her for Gabriel Fauré’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in A Major. His opus 13, the work premiered when its composer was 31; its success propelled Fauré’s career into high gear and secured his first publishing contract.
The concert closes with Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in A Major, the first of two works in the “viola quintet” form — adding a second viola to the string quartet — that Mozart had deeply explored with six such works. Mendelssohn’s quintet opens with a Mozartian first movement, followed by an intermezzo that is a heartfelt but not elegiac memorial to his friend and violin teacher Eduard Rietz.
The third movement is a scherzo with a vigorous, lighthearted quality, which was one of Mendelssohn’s specialties, while the finale reflects the composer’s interest in the music of Bach, highly unusual at the time, with its middle section of five-part counterpoint.
6 p.m. August 17; Angel Fire Community Center; $50-$55
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Asked to elaborate on a personal favorite in the season, both artistic directors identified the same work, which will be featured on August 18 in Raton and August 22 in Taos. “We are showing Buster Keaton’s genius silent film Sherlock, Jr. with a live music score for string quartet and piano written by genius pianist Steven Prutsman, our 2022 composer in residence,” Phillips says. “Full audience participation in booing and cheering will be encouraged.”
The pianist for the film screening is Chen, who will be joined by The Dolphin Quartet, four advanced performers from The Juilliard School. They’re part of the festival’s commitment to developing young talent, which brings two student quartets to northern New Mexico each summer for outreach programs in area schools as well as public performances.
The Raton program, which is free of charge, also includes the Chopin piano works and the Mendelssohn string quintet described above.
3 p.m. August 18; Shuler Theater, Raton; Free
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Not many of the manufactured titles for chamber music concerts include the word “terror,” but this one does: Chiaroscuro: Terror to Tranquility. The terror comes first, courtesy of Kenji Bunch’s Hobgoblinry for Viola and Harpsichord, performed by violist Toby Appel and harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh.
Bach provides the tranquility, in the form of his Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C Minor, with soloists Kemp Jernigan (oboe) and Daniel Phillips (violin). Traversing the distance between terror and tranquility falls to Ernö Dohnånyi and his early String Quartet No. 2 from 1906.
Composer Ernö Dohnånyi
This sadly underappreciated Hungarian composer was a contemporary of Béla Bartók, but his music wasn’t as daring. He was a superb craftsman, however, much in the manner of Johannes Brahms, and he deserves rediscovery. The Dohnånyi will be performed by The Dolphin Quartet.
6 p.m. August 21; United Church of Angel Fire; $50-$55
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Antonín Dvoˇrák’s beloved “American” String Quartet in F Major was composed in 1893, during the composer’s summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa. It was part of his three-year American sojourn running the National Conservatory, a progressive music school in New York.
The Vizsla Quartet makes its premiere with the Dvoˇrák piece. They’re all students at the Curtis Institute of Music where Kavafian teaches; the group’s unusual name comes from her passion for breeding and training the Hungarian hunting dogs.
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Composer Mélanie Hélène “Mel” Bonis
Sherlock, Jr. is also on this August 22 performance, as is the Sonata for Flute and Piano in C# Minor by Mélanie Hélène “Mel” Bonis, a pioneering French female composer who wrote more than 300 works during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
6 p.m. August 22; Taos Center for the Arts; $50-$55
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Music from Angel Fire launched a composer-in-residence project in 1986 and it now has a roster of distinguished participants including Richard Danielpour, Gabriela Lena Frank, Bright Sheng, Chick Corea, Roberto Sierra, Augusta Read Thomas, Joan Tower, Kevin Puts, Libby Larson, and Jennifer Higdon.
This year’s composer in residence is Marc Neikrug, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s artistic director, who will talk about his new work for Angel Fire at a free meet-the-composer event on August 23. Neikrug’s Oboe Quartet in Ten Parts, which was co-commissioned with Chamber Music Northwest and the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, receives its New Mexico premiere the following evening.
“Marc composed a quintet for piano and strings for my quartet to play with him,” Phillips says, “and we have played several other of his works, including a theater piece called Through Roses [which] unfolds a powerful story about a man’s personal experience in a Nazi concentration camp. The new piece for Angel Fire doesn’t have an explicit story but it does have Marc’s gripping emotional musical language.”
1:30 p.m. August 23; United Church of Angel Fire; Free
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Bandoneon virtuoso and composer Astor Piazzolla
Music from Angel Fire celebrates its 41st anniversary this year with a potpourri program titled Fiesta 41!. It opens with the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 6 in an arrangement for four cellos, then proceeds with Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Solo Violin Op. 27, No. 5, performed by Dongyoung Jake Shim of The Vizsla Quartet, and Kenji Bunch’s “Next Train” performed by violinist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu.
Tara Helen O’Connor will be joined by the festival’s string players for “Oblivion” and “Libertango” by Astor Piazzolla. They’re two of the composer’s most popular tangos, with the former having a more traditional quality and the latter, which has been recorded more than 500 times, celebrating his creation of nuevo tango. The finale is a Vivaldi concerto for four solo violins and continuo, featuring all the string players in this year’s festival.
6 p.m. August 23; Angel Fire Community Center; $40
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Imagine this: A music publisher once paid Mozart not to compose. Right after the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Mozart signed a contract to write three piano quartets (piano plus violin, viola, and cello), a genre he essentially invented. The first sold poorly, since the piano part was so difficult, and the publisher paid Mozart the rest of the down payment to abandon the others.
Luckily for us the second one, in E-flat Major, had already been written. It’s an ingratiating and expansive piece, especially in the final movement, which has such a bravura piano part that it often sounds like a mini concerto.
The Angel Fire premiere of Marc Neikrug’s Oboe Quartet in Ten Parts follows, featuring Kemp Jernigan, oboe; Daniel Phillips, violin; Toby Appel, viola; and Angela Park, cello. The concert closes with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G Major. The soloist group is two flutes and a violin, which gives the concerto an especially bright and sometimes perky sound, thanks to their high registers.
6 p.m. August 24; Angel Fire Community Center; $50-$55
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Classical music from three of the “B” composers comprises the repertory for the August 28 concert, but two of them aren’t Beethoven and Brahms. Luigi Boccherini is up first, with his Flute Sextet in A Major, Op. 16. Boccherini spent much of his adult life in Spain, as resident composer in a royal court where there must have been an excellent flute player. He wrote a series of flute quintets and sextets as a result, and they feature a demanding cello part in addition to that for the flute, which he almost certainly played himself.
The next atypical B follows — it’s Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and his Violin Sonata in F Major. Biber was both an exceptionally skilled violinist and a very forward-looking composer; in Britain’s The Observer Tarik O’Regan wrote of his sonatas, “One can find every permutation of double-stopping, counterpoint, and near-impossible passagework here.”
While the fifth of Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos was written for three solo instruments — flute, violin, and harpsichord — plus the continuo group of strings, it could also be considered the first harpsichord concerto, thanks to the instrument’s prominence throughout.
Bach seems to have written the part as a showcase for the two-keyboard harpsichord and its wider range of possibilities. It will be played here by Kathleen McIntosh, with O’Connor and Benny Kim taking the solo flute and violin roles, respectively.
6 p.m. August 28; Baptist Church of Angel Fire; $50-$55
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You’ll be two years older at the end of this season-finale concert than you were at the beginning. After a J.S. Bach flute sonata featuring O’Connor and McIntosh, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Astor Piazzola’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires will whiz you through 24 months in about 70 minutes.
Vivaldi’s version consists of four violin concertos, each of which depicts activities during the corresponding season. Each concerto was first published with a sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi, specifying the inspiration for the music. That for the summer concerto includes the following passage, as a thunderstorm approaches:
(Slowly and quietly to very fast and loud)
The fear of lightning and fierce thunder
Robs the shepherd’s tired limbs of rest
As gnats and flies buzz furiously around.
Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, the Argentinian tango master Piazzolla revolutionized the traditional form by adding elements from jazz and classical music and forgoing the vocalist. The resulting nuevo tango was often scored for violin, electric guitar, bass, and piano, in addition to Piazzolla’s bandoneon (a German-invented concertina), combining aspects of chamber music composition with improvisation in performance.
His version depicting the four seasons in Buenos Aires was written over a several-year period and premiered as a cycle in 1970. The Angel Fire performance uses an arrangement by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov that recasts the work for solo violin and small orchestra, à la the original. It also incorporates several musical quotations from the Vivaldi, using the Southern Hemisphere’s inversion of the seasons, with Piazzolla’s spring featuring music from Vivaldi’s fall, and so on.
6 p.m. August 29; Angel Fire Community Center; $50-$55
