Metamorphosis on the Lake

CLASSICAL MUSIC, as far as mainstream listeners are concerned, has become remote and intimidating. Probably because it has faded from pop-culture contexts. It used to permeate cartoons (saluted recently by an appearance at Caroga Arts by The Queen’s Cartoonists), not to mention mainstream movies and TV commercials, but my understanding is that such is now rarely the case.

Garrett Hudson, Jason Kutz, and Kara LaMoure

What’s needed is a community-based approach in which the music is performed in a welcoming space with a track record of presenting enjoyable stuff, and this is exactly the forum presented each summer for the past baker’s-dozen years by the Caroga Arts Collective. The group offers an ambitious program that takes place on the grounds of a former amusement park next to a still-popular but somewhat obscure lake in New York’s Fulton County, a damp dot on the map between Utica and Albany. It remains a popular summer resort, so the concerts have a built-in local draw, but the series has gained a reputation that summons an audience from beyond as well.

They take a two-pronged approach to programming, nesting the classical-music concerts amidst a schedule of pop-music events. And the classical music is performed by an ensemble comprising players drawn from throughout the country who participate in a summer-long program of training and performance, players who are immensely skilled when they get there and are no doubt even better when they leave.

Which brings me to the concert I attended on August 2, held in the venerable Sherman’s Park Dance Hall building. It’s a large space with a flexible layout, largely defined by the placement of chairs. The concert was titled “Metamorphosis: Where Nature Meets Music,” and the presence of four large TV screens portended what was to come.

The big piece on the program, the only one mentioned in the publicity I saw, was Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” which is a formidable work. Its 25 minutes are a dense tapestry for strings alone – 23 of them! – in which melodic kernels twine and grow across a fabric of shifting emotions. I was sold, especially as I’ve never seen a live performance of the piece. And I was intrigued by the promise of images of nature to accompany the piece.

But the program opened more conventionally, with the two final movements from Ernst von Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C, Op. 37. The composer’s name may be familiar to Cleveland Orchestra fans, where grandson Christoph was music director for a couple of decades. And Ernst himself featured on concert programs during the early 20th century when his “Variations on a Nursery Tune” was all the rage.

His music is romantic and accessible, touched at times with influences from his native Hungary. His sextet, written in 1935, is unusually scored for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and horn. The bouncy scherzo jumps right into the concluding movement, marked Allegro vivace, giocoso, and playful it is with a jazzy feel throughout as it teases us with contrasting moods. The players were violinists Andy Liang and Alexander Grimes, clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson, Anni Hochhalter on horn, cellist Hyugrai Kim, and Jason Kutz at the piano. A great opening work.

Audience chairs were set in a circle surrounding what would prove to be the playing area for the Strauss, but the Dohnanyi performers clustered in an area off to the side. The acoustics were excellent, but if you couldn’t see the players, the TV screens carried (slightly off-sync) close-ups. 

That opener offered a great segue to Kenji Bunch’s “Danceband,” a Wolftrap commission from 2007. Each of the three (of five) movements celebrated a contrasting approach to rhythm. “Slip Jig,” as the title suggests, soon gave us lively dance tunes in multiples of 3, the violin glorying double-stops. But the beginning of the piece was mysterious, even mystical, as drummer Brian Shank used his snares as hand-drums, and it finished with an unexpected decrescendo into pianissimo. Ariel Horowitz was the violinist; Yi-Mei Templeman the cellist.

They swapped out for the next movement, as Raffi Boden took the cello chair and David Wong played violin. This was “Backstep,” marked “Lively,” with more fiddle-like double stops over the syncopated from the cojone on which Shank was perched. And then “Disco Fantasy,” provocatively marked “Tempo di Polyester.” Piano and bongos led the way, welcoming a drone from violin and cello that soon grew much more lively. Then an excellent surprise (and a nod to Peter Schickele) as the music settled into a vamp that served as a bed for violinist Josh Henderson to give a rousing introduction of the players, with Borden again on cello. And then, of course, an up-tempo finale.

Composer Yuko Uebayashi was born in Japan and presently resides in France. Her ten-movement “Misericordia” was written in 2013 for celebrated flutist Carol Wincenc, although I would put Caroga’s Garrett Hudson right up there alongside her. Hudson played the program’s two “Misericordia” movements deftly and with seasoned-performer aplomb. The work is scored to include a string quartet, in this case comprising violinists (in movement VII) Ann Yu and Sherri Zhang, (in movement X) Eliza Wong and Benjamin Kronk, violist (VII) Serena Hsu then (X) Deborah Barrett Price, and cellist (VII) Julian Müller then (X) Ken Kubota. All of this swapping out of chairs allows Caroga Arts to showcase the talents of the tremendous amount of players who participate in the festival.

VII. Le septieme mois, “Les feux de péniches qui naviguent” translates as “The seventh month, The lights of the barges that pass.” If you’re looking for a feeling mists rising from the water as those running-lamps glow in the distance, it’s here. There’s a minimalist feel to the flute line at first, then flowing arpeggios give a sense of gentle movement.

Movement X is the work’s last movement, “Le dixieme mois, Célébration.” It’s marked Allegro jocoso, and added David Scholl on bass. It’s characterized by a five-note sequence, begun by the flute then picked up by the strings as the flute rides on top with a lyrical, joyful passage. It’s reminiscent of the finish of Fela Sowande’s “African Suite,” which only goes to show that contrasting cultures find similar ways to have fun.

The contrasts among the works by living composers energized this program, and that energy was abetted by the careful intrusion of some dead-guy music, too. Like the “Terzetto” by Théodore Lalliet, from 1872, written for flute, bassoon, and piano. We were given its second movement, Andante maestoso, scored in 12/8 time and kept lively by the four sixteenth notes that quicken a persistent pattern in the piano. And that was only one facet of the changing textures, exploring the rich, sinewy sound of the winds. It was Hudson again on flute, with bassoonist Kara LaMoure. The latter is about to come back, but this audience-pleaser marked the last of the succession of pieces pianist Jason Kutz would play this evening. He demonstrated an easy facility with the many different styles of music set before him, and this one was a triumphant, virtuoso finale for him.  

The player configuration changed to a circle within the audience rings. The ensemble assembled for Mendelssohn’s Konzertstück Nr. 2 in D minor, Op 114, for clarinet, basset horn, and piano,
here performed (as is usually the case) with bassoon, and in an orchestral version that probably was the work of Carl Baermann. As those younger than I are inclined to say: Whatever. The point is that this is one of Mendelssohn’s cheerful pieces, about nine-minutes’ worth of lively, tuneful soloist moments against a canvas of changing tempos, like the many opera-theme variation pieces popular at the time, except that this was all Mendelssohn.

The sound in this hall of the full ensemble was lovely. Nothing like an old wooden shell of a building to do justice to unamplified instruments. Especially the winds. Clarinetist Johnson and bassoonist LaMoure melded sound like seasoned pros, which I suspect is what a summer like this turns you into.

Then Akshaya Avril Tucker, the youngest composer on the program, put LaMoure in the spotlight with an impressively accomplished piece, “Variations on Care,” written during pandemic isolation for a solo instrument, then revised to add orchestral accompaniment. As the composer explained, it explores the technical boundaries of the bassoon, with which Tucker is familiar: she herself is a cellist, but her grandfather played bassoon.

The “Care” of the title refers to care for oneself and one’s community; the music that expresses this is Impressionist in the feeling it evokes as the solo instrument explores a variety of changes.
Long string lines in the opening gave way to harmonics as the bassoon entered intentionally tentatively, with trills; the five variations that followed shimmered from mysterious to intense and back again, with an especially poignant moment in variation four that paired bassoon and cello, their registers confluent, their timbres contrasting, over a Bartókian feeling in the other strings. A gorgeous piece.

 Justin Grubb is director and partner of Running Wild Media, a visual arts company specializing, as he explained, in encouraging “conservation through visual storytelling.” His work has been used by PBS, National Geographic, and the BBC, among many others. His subjects include many endangered species, some of which never have been filmed before.

A perfect visual accompaniment to Takashi Yoshimatsu’s “And birds are still ... ” a meditative eight minutes of contained energy. Violins introduce hesitant triplet-figure components over a long viola note, then the rhythm opens gently to an undulating sense of motion. The video images included winter birds to start; as the music built in intensity, we were treated to summer. Owls in a tree. Mating rituals, or quarreling, which often look the same. Then back to those opening gestures for a gentle, sleepy-bird ending.

Strauss offers an impossible either-or for his “Metamorphosen”: 23 string players, one to a part, or a septet. With neither configuration at hand, artistic director Kyle Barrett Price told me later, the ensemble itself fashioned a suitable arrangement. Price is also principal cellist with the group, thus putting him in the forefront of the opening of the piece. It’s a kaleidoscopic work, at once confined in its musical elements by expansive in its color, so how nice to see an undersea world in motion as the piece began. Anemones, otters, a passing ray, and then a manatee led us to terra firma, a hillside of grasses upon which hovered bees.

I’m not a fan of nature videos because I don’t like phony setups and relentlessly moving cameras. Neither of those things was on display here. “I don’t want the viewer to be conscious of the camera,” Grubb told me later, and he prides himself on honesty, not sensationalism.

Elephants frolicked over sinewy violin lines; baboons moved to thicker tonal textures. Animals ranged from mountain goat to caterpillar, hippo to clownfish. As the music grew more intense, so too did the images: A desert. An explosion. Hurricane fencing. Then more obviously man-made intrusions like smokestacks and factory farming and factory fishing.

There’s a quote from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, a musical quote from the Funeral March movement, but we do get some musical reclamation as well. And we got some onscreen as we watched plants and animals and marine life being rescued and healed. A sunset, a waterscape. A haunting multimedia experience that I hope will put the Strauss work on more favorite-piece lists than it occupied before. Urban concert emporia give the wrong idea about where music belongs. It belongs in a place like this where superb players perform excellent works for a welcoming audience.

Metamorphosis: Where Nature Meets Music
Caroga Arts Collective
Sherman’s Park, Caroga Lake, NY, August 2, 2024