For 14 summers now, René Reder has joined her colleagues in the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival as they transform a South Florida July into a sonic oasis.
And the violist wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s some of the most satisfying playing of my life,” said Reder, whose fulltime job is as a member of the viola section in the Alabama Symphony in Birmingham. “I can’t imagine my summer without it. And going from hot, steamy Alabama to completely humid, hot Florida is not the draw … It’s the people and the music, and that particular group of people. They draw me. Of course I want to go: I really can’t imagine going anywhere else.”
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival opens its 24th season Thursday with the first of its four weekends of concerts. The festival features 12 concerts spread over four weeks; each week has one program that’s played three times in different parts of the county: Palm Beach Gardens on Friday night, West Palm Beach on Saturday night, and Delray Beach on Sunday afternoon.
The festival, which has six fine recordings to its credit on Boca Raton’s Klavier label, is distinctive for its modesty, straightforwardness and its attention to unusual repertoire. Although the festival always features a canonical masterwork or two, most of the programming consists of excellent but lesser-known compositions that are searched out by musicians whose dedication to their craft has them searching worklists and libraries for fresh pieces that will interest their audience.
“I’ve kidded around on this before, but I keep telling them we should change the name of the festival to ‘The JTU Festival: The Just Trust Us Festival,’” said bassoonist Michael Ellert, one of three co-founders along with flutist Karen Dixon and clarinetist Michael Forte. “Because many times, we’ve come away with people telling us, ‘I’ve never heard of this composer, but this was my favorite piece you played this summer.’”
Reder, a native of Tacoma, Wash., whose background includes work with the New World Symphony and the Florida Philharmonic, also enjoys the focus on unusual repertoire.
“They are so good about picking stuff that is incredibly accessible,” she said, speaking from her home in Decatur, Ala. “There’s stuff that is severely off the wall, and they’ve never come near that. There’s always something (good) you can come out of these concerts with.”
This weekend (the group plays Thursday night in Tequesta because the July 4 holiday falls on Saturday and there is no performance that day) the program features two contemporary American works — Eric Ewazen’s Trio for violin, trumpet and piano, and the Eight Miniatures (Hommage à Igor Stravinsky) by the young Stefan Cwik — along with a Romantic rarity, the Trio for flute, oboe and bassoon of Julius Röntgen, a German composer who made his career in the Netherlands, where he helped found the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. The concert also includes the beautiful, unusual Terzetto for two violins and viola of Antonin Dvořák.
“As a musician, if you just play all the same stuff all the time, you’re just not personally challenged,” Reder said. “That’s part of what a musician is looking for: something new, and a different way to express yourself.”
The second weekend of concerts (July 10-12) includes music by Telemann (Heldenmusik), the French Romantic composer and pedagogue Theodore Dubois (Piano Quintet in F), and Morton Gould’s Benny’s Gig, which will be performed in tribute to the late Stuart Bloch, a longtime festival board member and jazz aficionado. An early wind piece by Beethoven — the Op. 71 sextet, here arranged for quintet — is featured, as well as a masterpiece by Brahms, his Horn Trio.
The three founders, all members of the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, are wind players and less naturally drawn to the staple of most chamber music festivals, the string quartet. Still, quartets make regular appearances on the group’s programs, and the third week (July 17-19) includes the “Bird” Quartet of Haydn (No. 32 in C, Hob. III: 39), whose finale is well-known to woodwind players in a popular arrangement.
“I’ve been playing it since I was in high school, so we’re talking 1966,” Ellert said, chatting over a pleasant lunch recently in Boca Raton. “Fifty years I’ve been playing this piece, and I had no idea where it came from.”
Other works featured are the Clarinet Quintet of the black British Romantic composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s Soli I for oboe, clarinet, trumpet and bassoon, and two French works: Gabriel Pierné’s Pastorale Varieé, a wind septet with a trumpet and second bassoon, and Vincent d’Indy’s Chansons et Danses, another wind septet, this time with a second clarinet and second bassoon.
The festival’s final week (July 24-26) features the luminous Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp of Debussy, three tangos by Piazzolla arranged for violin and bass, and two rarities: a wind trio by the German Romantic Heinrich Neumann, and the Nonetto for wind quintet, string trio and bass of the fine mid-19th-century French woman composer Louise Farrenc.
Next year will mark the 25th season of the festival, and Ellert said planning is underway to mark the occasion, perhaps by starting off with a re-creation of the first festival concert in July 1992, which took place at the black-box Stage West at Palm Beach State College’s Duncan Theatre in Lake Worth. But he also is interested in presenting a chamber opera such as Menotti’s The Medium, Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, or even Walton’s The Bear.
“We’re also talking about maybe doing a program where we go to massive forces, and do something like the Mozart 13-wind serenade on one half, and a string serenade on the other half,” he said. Another possibility: The commissioning of a new work to commemorate the anniversary.
Other ideas for expansion or changes in the festival — which, as Ellert always points out, is a concert series more than it is a festival — include a night of jazz on the Thursday before the three performances. The festival also began a series of winter performances this past season at venues such as Palm Beach’s Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church.
This festival is a cultural institution of a remarkably intimate kind. The players dress relatively casually for the performances, and each piece is introduced by a musician who gives brief remarks about the composer and the piece, often in an endearing, school-report fashion. Concerts are always followed by light refreshments in the form of budget-line cookies and punch, and the musicians are there to mingle with the audience and discuss the music they’ve just heard.
“The audiences have always been good,” Reder said. “They get a sense of how true we are to the music. We’re there to share, and we hope they’re there for the ride.”
Over the years, the average audience total for each week hovers around 700 people, Ellert said. Much of the audience has been coming to the concerts for many years, and Ellert said those listeners have heard a great deal of music if they’ve stuck with it from the beginning.
“This is our 24th season, we have six CDs, we’ve done 334 different pieces, and we’ve hired 135 different musicians over the 23 years. It’s incredible,” he said. “We’ve done something here; it’s kind of amazing.”
Reder, 43, who was married last year to Dan Keys, a Boeing software engineer working for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., invokes the idea of Old Home Week when talking about her participation in the festival, which began rather casually. A member of a carpool to Florida Philharmonic rehearsals, she was asked to step in when the group needed a violist, and has been there ever since.
“Every time we get together every summer, it’s just part of my family at this point. It’s a reunion,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much fun it is to work with these guys.”
If you go
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival performs Program I at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta; Friday at Persson Recital Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach; and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach.
Week 2 (July 10-12),Week 3 (July 17-19) and Week 4 (July 24-26) features concerts at 7:30 p.m. Fridays at Persson Hall, 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest. Tickets are $25. Call 547-1070 or visit www.pbcmf.org.