Don’t expect to see programs with titles like “In a Romantic Mood” or “Happy B-day, Ludwig van B,” or “¡Viva España!” at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival anytime soon.
“I don’t do themes, I don’t do birthdays, and I don’t do geography,” says Neikrug, who’s now in his 26th year with the company. What he does do is create program pairings that harmonize perfectly, even if the reasons they do so aren’t overt, a skill for which he is widely recognized.
“Marc Neikrug’s programming has earned deserved popularity with the audiences of the Santa Fe Chamber Music and respect internationally,” says renowned pianist Kirill Gerstein, who is as enthusiastic a player of chamber music as he is of orchestral concerts, via email. “His curation over the past 25 festivals demonstrates that cultivating the trust and taste of the audience results in gradually bringing the core chamber repertoire, the rich field of lieder, and both modern and specially commissioned works ever nearer to the listeners. As a result, participation in the festival is a most stimulating and fulfilling experience for both musicians and public.”
Neikrug revealed the secret of his success to Pasatiempo: it’s thinking like a composer. His primary focus is composition, which his extensive credits in performance and administration helped support financially. Neikrug estimates that he has programmed more than 1,000 concerts between his chamber music festival tenure, as the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s special consultant in Minneapolis for contemporary programs, and in 35 years as violinist Pinchas Zukerman’s recital partner.
“How a composer ‘sees’ and thinks about the music is completely different from a player or an impresario,” he says. “If you ask a performer to program a concert, you tend to get things that show off their skills but don’t have much coherence. Composers think much more critically about the music because that’s what we had to do in order to learn.”
There’s only one downside to it. “Listening to music should be an emotionally triggering experience,” Neikrug says. “I want the audience members to trust their own honest reactions to what they’re hearing. When I listen it’s almost impossible to turn off the judgment side and appreciate it.”
The son of two highly esteemed professional cellists, Neikrug absorbed a steady dose of contemporary music in utero and beyond. Both parents were advocates for new work and his mother was a composer, writing in the strictest possible 12-tone style.
“She wrote everything at the piano,” he says, “and I was placed in a basket underneath, staring up listening to these Schoenbergian things being played. Becoming a composer was an inescapable destiny.”
Like many budding composers, Neikrug threw out much of his early work. He started writing music at age five, adorning his scores with crayon drawings, then folding them into paper airplanes and tossing them out an apartment window.
“My parents would run down to try to find them,” he says. “The drawings were usually an orchestra with a huge piano and a bald guy sitting at the piano. [Neikrug is bald.] The art was more interesting than the compositions, which usually had a lot of middle Cs.”
Following a temporary detour — “My ambition was to be a jazz pianist. I also had a rock band, and it drove my parents out of their minds, which was the purpose. I actually played with Little Richard!” — Neikrug returned to classical music. After two years as a composer in residence, he became the chamber music festival’s artistic director in 1998.
The festival’s 2024 season is back to its standard size and scope, following the 50th anniversary that included an unusually large number of commissioned works, some for the anniversary itself and some that were deferred from pandemic years, as well as a gala concert.
Composer David Clay Mettens.
Two of this year’s four commissions are by Reuben Jennings and David Clay Mettens, who are participants in the festival’s string quartet project for young composers. Their work will be featured on an August 2 concert.
The world premiere of Xinyang Wang’s 清梦压星河 (Plodding into a Starlit Dream) takes place on an August 6 program, coupled with film composer Bernard Herrmann’s Souvenirs de Voyage for Clarinet Quintet, which is based on themes from his score for Vertigo. Outi Tarkiainen’s Sensory Flashbacks for Clarinet, Piano, and Strings bows on August 18, along with works by Gioachino Rossini and Johannes Brahms.
“There has been a slew of incredibly important English composers in my lifetime,” Neikrug says, citing Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, and Thomas Adès. “Julian Anderson, whom we’ve commissioned twice, is right in that league,” and his The Bearded Lady for Clarinet and Piano is featured on the festival’s July 21 and 22 concerts. (The title refers to the character Baba the Turk in the opera The Rake’s Progress; the composer sees it as a reflection on her character and “upon the ridicule to which such circus freaks have always been subjected.”)
It’s “a fantastically dramatic piece and a great program opener,” Neikrug says, and it involves choreography to be executed by clarinetist Todd Levy. The Bearded Lady is followed by Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for Flute and Piano (“Substantial and lush, romantic Prokofiev at his most effective,” says Neikrug) and Antonín Dvoˇrák’s String Sextet in A Major. It was composed in 1878, when his career was just beginning to take off, and it features many aspects of the Slavic nationalism that helped fuel his international recognition.
Neikrug is also very enthusiastic about British pianist Julius Drake, calling him “the closest thing to Gerald Moore since Gerald Moore.” (Moore was the preeminent accompanist, as they were then called, in the world of art song for several 20th-century decades.) Neikrug’s opinion was seconded by The New Yorker, which called him “the collaborative pianist nonpareil.”
Santa Fe audiences will have two chances to hear Drake, on an August 7 song program with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, in music by Charles Ives, Henri Duparc, and Jean Sibelius, and an August 8 instrumental program, teamed with horn player Nathaniel Silberschlag for Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano and with violinist William Hagen for Beethoven’s Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano.
“This is a really good example of the variety and scope I like the programs to have,” says Neikrug in referring to the season-closing August 19 concert, in which a Mozart string quartet is bracketed by works of Czech composers Leoš Janáˇcek and Dvoˇrák.
The Janáˇcek is his Sonata for Piano and Violin from 1914. “It’s a fascinating piece and is difficult to describe because of the imaginative, very unexpected places it takes you,” says Neikrug. “It goes into a world which is truly mysterious.”
Mozart’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, K. 428 is one of the six in the set he dedicated to Joseph Haydn. It’s a remarkable piece, especially the first movement, with its melodically adventurous nature, and the second, which suggests the chromaticism and upward harmonic resolutions later heard in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
The concert and the season end with Dvoˇrák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, “one of the three absolutely great piano quintets, along with those of Brahms and Schumann,” Neikrug says. “Mozart and Dvoˇrák are about the best pairing there is.” ◀
