Festival galas come and go, but some remain firmly anchored in the mind and heart. This was the case when the Music Festival of the Hamptons gala opening concert, heard last Friday night in the festival tent on Snake Hollow Road in Bridgehampton, produced some major reasons for rejoicing.
It was all, of course, a matter of programming. Now in its ninth season, this festival, founded by the indefatigable Eleanor Sage Leonard and led by Lukas Foss, its music director, has long strived for but has not always attained true distinction. Last Friday, however, it achieved it by presenting Benjamin Britten’s seldom heard Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings and Mozart’s ravishing Sinfonia Concertante for solo violin and viola. Maestro Foss produced lightning strikes on both counts, erring only in the evening’s opening work, Mozart’s quite inconsequential overture to La Finta Giardiniera.
The soloists in Britten’s Serenade were the young American tenor Scott Murphree and the fine horn player R.J. Kelley. Mr. Murphree not only offered compelling personal insight into this haunting 1943 work, but sang with an authority and allure that literally held the audience spellbound.
This work, originally written for Britten’s companion, the tenor Peter Pears, and the horn virtuoso Dennis Brain, centers on six poems (by, among others, Tennyson, Blake, Ben Jonson, and Keats), each of which dwells on aspects of the night — the darkness that envelops the world and can lift, confound, or crush the soul. Suspended within a terse panoply of harmonic wonders and charged with dark secrets and enigmas, the work demands a singer whose voice can not only soar toward the highest reaches of the tenor range but must also be in firmest control of diction and mood.
Mr. Murphree, with his fresh, beautifully modulated, innocence-tinged voice, his finely chiseled features, and alert demeanor, not only fulfilled these difficult criteria, but transformed an unusually seductive work into a memorable musical experience. Indeed, Mr. Murphree is that rarity, an artist of instinctive taste and uncommon musicality.
My first encounter with Mozart’s Sinfonie Concertante was in 1947 when George Balanchine choreographed one of his major ballets to this score, with Maria Tallchief as “the violin” and Tanaquil LeClerq as “the viola.” For me, a 19-year-old, it was the shock of the too madly beautiful! The gorgeous choreography. The superb dancers. And, above all, that score, with its unending sinuous lines, crossing and recrossing and echoing one another in achingly beautiful sequence.
Last Friday, Maestro Foss understood the perfect symmetry of this immensely moving score, leading the Atlantic Chamber Orchestra with vigor and elegance. His soloists were the violinist Michael Guttman and the violist Jesse Levine, both of whom acquitted themselves well, with Mr. Levine being perhaps the more refined musician.
Mr. Guttman, who is the Atlantic Chamber Orchestra’s founder and music director (and who should really retire that coy photograph of himself and his violin, in bizarre juxtaposition, which, in its overexposure has become truly tiresome) tends to have easily correctible intonation problems.
The festival gala ended with two salutes: one to Representative Tim Bishop, the other to the playwright Edward Albee. Both men accepted their honors with charming gala speeches.
It would seem that no one really knows just what produces a child prodigy. Experts have it that the causes may be genetic, evolutionary, cultural, historical, or a combination of all of those things. Whatever the cause, this mystery was astonishingly on display last Sunday morning, when the Music Festival of the Hamptons, in a delightful programming coup, presented Drew Petersen, age 10, in a piano recital that included works by Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Aaron Copland.
Master Petersen, a sweet, open-faced boy in a white dress shirt, black bow tie, and long pants, walked quietly to the concert grand piano, took a brief bow, then sat at the keyboard. Pausing a moment, he slowly lifted his arms and attacked the sonorous, majestic opening chord of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13. It was clear from the strength and resonance of that chord, that what followed would have clarity and impact.
Indeed, the sonata, with all its technical hurdles, its ebb and flow of melody, and its rush of contrapuntal invention, proved a natural challenge for the pianist, who, while perhaps not always equal to the work’s more nuanced emotional demands, gave the music its full due. His runs were light and limpid. Melodic passages were lovingly articulated, and the whole had both cohesion and breadth.
But it was with his playing of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8 in D-flat major, that the miracle of being a prodigy came wondrously to the fore. It seemed as though Drew Petersen instinctively understood that Chopin was spinning a long, contemplative dream — that the filigree lights and shadows of this hushed work contained the sophisticated languors of a yearning heart.
To hear a 10-year-old boy breathe life and romantic subtlety into so expressive a work, is to encounter the true mystery of what makes so very young a person leap toward the flames of artistic maturity.
In the remainder of his short program, consisting of Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 13 and Copland’s Scherzo Humoristique (“The Cat and the Mouse”), plus an encore by Khachaturian, the pianist negotiated all manner of wizardly keyboard feats, offering his hugely responsive and enthusiastic audience thrilling pianism wedded to astute, quite astonishing musicianship. Bouquets and bravos to master Drew!
— John Jonas Gruen, The East Hampton Star