Every Carmel Bach Festival (CBF) that Artistic Director Grete Pedersen has overseen has had an overriding theme. This year’s iteration, her third — running July 12–26 — is titled “Dialogues,” meaning the connections between composers and their influence on one another. A secondary theme is The Art of Fugue, that masterwork by the festival’s patron saint, J.S. Bach.
The latter thread showed up even before the opening concert in the Sunset Center Theater on Saturday, July 12. The Tower Brass struck up Contrapunctus I from The Art at the traditional free preconcert prelude on the venue’s terrace. Pedersen seems determined to keep Bach in her sights even as she continues to freshen the repertoire of the festival as a whole.
To kick off the symphonic program that followed, Pedersen chose one of those miracles of Felix Mendelssohn’s teen years, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The dialogue here was not so obvious: Mendelssohn’s father bought a large collection of Bach manuscripts that figured heavily in his son’s education. Bach’s music spoke so powerfully to Mendelssohn that he was primarily responsible for reviving the Baroque composer at a time when he had long since fallen out of fashion.
While the violinists of the Festival Orchestra were adept at handling the fizzing passages evoking Shakespeare’s fairyland, the two horns and timpani tended to blot out everything else in the more thickly scored sections. In general, the performance sounded best when the textures were less brass-heavy and quieter.
Igor Stravinsky may seem like an outlier at a Bach festival, but Saturday’s program essay pointed out that in 1935, the year CBF was inaugurated, the composer himself appeared in Carmel with violinist Samuel Dushkin. Together, they played a recital that included a distillation for piano and violin of Stravinsky’s wonderful ballet score Pulcinella. This music is, in essence, a dialogue between the modernist composer and a host of Baroque luminaries (although at the time he wrote it, Stravinsky thought he was communing only with Giovanni Pergolesi).
So that’s how the Pulcinella Suite popped up next on the concert. While Pedersen, a veteran choral conductor, usually uses just her hands to guide the music, here she wielded a baton, possibly to better control the sneaky dissonances and misplaced accents that Stravinsky deploys diabolically to tweak his source material.
Pedersen also launched another dialogue by thoughtfully having Pablo Picasso’s crude-looking sketches for Sergei Diaghilev’s original 1920 production of the ballet projected behind the orchestra. With the two double basses placed on opposite sides of the stage to emphasize yet another dialogue, the playing was spirited and zesty, overcoming a few rocky passages.
The big work of the evening was something of a rare bird, Haydn’s Harmoniemesse, the composer’s 14th and final Mass and his last major work of any kind. Pedersen and the orchestra were on home ground with this grandly joyous choral piece, playing with greater security. The Festival Chorale made a bigger sound than its chamber-sized numbers would indicate. The Gloria and Agnus Dei sections came to particularly exultant closing stretches, and the rhythm of the triple-meter section of the Credo had a nice swing to it.
Soprano Clara Rottsolk, a regular soloist here over the past three years, displayed a beaming timbre, contrasting with mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz’s creamy sound. Tenor Brian Giebler was in sturdy form, and the booming bass-baritone of Dashon Burton anchored the vocal quartet. The same soloists will take part in all three Masses presented this season, a continuing dialogue in itself.
