this week at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. From left:
Ellen Tomasiewicz, Rebecca Diderrich, Beth Larsen,
Michael Ellert, Roberta Rust, Julia McAlister,
Rene Reder and Sherie Aguirre.
(Photo by Michael Price Photography)
By Greg Stepanich
It all began at Chuck and Harold’s.
On a long-ago day at the popular Palm Beach restaurant, bassoonist Michael Ellert noticed something right away about Michael Forte, a clarinetist and fellow New Yorker who had just moved to Florida, and with whom he was playing as part of a trio.
“I looked at Michael and I said, ‘Man, you and I must have learned how to play out of tune the same way, because we play amazingly well together,’” Ellert said, laughing. “It was just a lock, the first time.”
That sense of camaraderie is one of the things that led Forte, Ellert and flutist Karen Dixon, all members of the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, to found a summer festival of chamber music in Palm Beach County, a concert series that begins its 20th anniversary season tonight in West Palm Beach. And it is that collegiality that keeps the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival going, keeps its core players coming back each year, and keeps winning over audiences.
“The mission has stayed the same: Focus on the music, with South Florida musicians,” Forte said of the festival, which debuted July 10, 1992, at the Duncan Theater at what was then Palm Beach Community College in Lake Worth. “Rather than traipsing off somewhere to play chamber music or do something else at a summer festival, they can do it here.”
One not-incidental goal of the effort was to show audiences that the making of classical music wasn’t restricted to the season or to snowbirds. “We were trying to dispel that myth that there’s nobody in South Florida in the summer,” Forte said.
The festival started small, with just three concerts, but by 1996, it had grown to 12 concerts, given over four weeks and in three different venues. About 3,000 people turn out each July for the concerts, and Ellert, the group’s repertoire master, said the musicians have presented about 250 pieces in the course of its existence.
In so doing, they have created a South Florida summer cultural institution. But there is another legacy of the festival that is at least as important: The six discs it has recorded for Boca Raton’s Klavier label. The first, Buried Treasure, was released in 2000, the most recent, Ever Changing, in 2010, and the discs are exceptional for one overriding reason: The freshness of the repertory.
“One of the things important about the festival is performing pieces that have not earned their obscurity,” said Clark McAlister, a vice president at Edwin Kalmus, which owns Klavier, and the festival’s composer in residence. “A lot of them don’t. We’re rooting out the pieces that need to be heard.”
Each of the festival’s four programs is performed three times, in the south, central and northern parts of Palm Beach County. The concerts are set for 8 p.m. Fridays (July 8, 15, 22 and 29) at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach; 8 p.m. Saturdays (July 9, 16, 23 and 30) at the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens; and at 2 p.m. Sundays (July 10, 17, 24, and 31) in the Crest Theatre at Old School Square in Delray Beach.
As they have in past seasons, the musicians revisit some pieces that have worked well in the past, and chief among them this year is L’Histoire du Soldat, Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 tale of a soldier and the Devil, which will end the festival in Week 4. It’s a 20th-century masterwork, and organizers have retained the services of the three actors who performed it with them in a previous season: Joe Gillie, Barbara Bradshaw and Randolph Dellago.
Another seminal work of modernism, Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, is heard in Week 1 along with the great Serenade No. 10 (in B-flat, K. 361) of Mozart, also known as the Gran Partita or the Serenade for 13 Winds. Schubert’s beloved Death and the Maiden Quartet (No. 14 in D minor, D. 810) is scheduled for Week 2, and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (in A, K. 581) is set for Week 3. Forte is featured in that work, and Dixon takes the solo spotlight in Week 4 with a septet version of the Orchestral Suite No. 2 (in B minor, BWV 1067) of J.S. Bach.
Each summer’s programs always feature one work for the three founders, and this year it’s Fragments, by the American composer Robert Muczynski, who died last year. It’s a brief, charming work that appears on the festival’s Buried Treasure disc and in Week 4. There’s always a wind quintet each season, and this time around it’s a John McDonough arrangement of the Capriol Suite, by the English composer Peter Warlock (Week 2).
The programs also feature less well-known music by Eugene Bozza, Philippe Gaubert, Bohuslav Martinu and a trio for flute, bassoon and marimba, called Mosaics, by the contemporary American composer Eric Ewazen.
Each piece in the festival gets from six to 12 hours of rehearsal, which is substantial, and all players regardless of their duties are paid festival-style: A flat rate of $500 a week. Dixon, 49, said it makes for a busy run-up to the concerts.
“The way our schedule is, we don’t have a day off,” she said.
Dixon said the planning meeting that the festival musicians always promise each other they’ll have after the festival ends never seems to happen, but dates at the venues are secured as soon as feasible. Musicians suggest wish lists of works they’d like to play in the concerts, and Ellert, a self-confessed addict of the far reaches of publisher catalogs, makes a point of seeking out underappreciated repertoire for possible inclusion.
This year’s selection of the Ewazen trio, for instance, came about as a result of a serendipitous late-night search on YouTube, he said, and the Bozza (Four Movements for Wind Septet, in Week 2), is completely new to the musicians.
The three founders say they’ve often received suggestions for expanding the festival to another week, perhaps by bringing in outside ensembles and giving the home team a rest. But the four weeks of concerts push the musicians to their limit.
“To do anything else, someone would have to do it for us,” said Ellert, 61. And doing concerts during the regular, event-crammed season isn’t workable either, they said.
The 20 seasons have provided the expected collection of high and low points. The three founders look to the previous L’Histoire, the recordings, and a conductor-less reading of the suite from Aaron Copland’s Applachian Spring ballet score as musical peaks.
One of the low points was offered by a disgruntled patron of the series in the early years. Dixon had worked up the Duettino Concertante for flute and percussion of the 20th-century German-American composer Ingolf Dahl. “It was a really cool piece, and we really worked hard on it,” she said. “And I remember feeling that we did a really good job.”
But the audience member disagreed.
“I had someone at the Crest Theatre come up to me after the concert, at the reception, and say, ‘How could you subject me to that? That was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I would have left but I was in the middle of the row and I couldn’t get out,’” she said. “I was so taken aback, I was speechless.”
Those kinds of experiences, though, have been rare. For the most part, this has been a festival with a steady, loyal following, summer after summer.
“People say to us, ‘I really love coming to these concerts. It just looks like you guys are having a really good time out there,’” said Forte, 59. “And that means a lot.”
The three say they’re planning to keep the series going as long as they can, and say the festivals have become an extension of what the original concert was: A gathering of friends.
“That’s one of the great things about this,” Ellert said, pointing out that the core group of players has been with the series for more than 10 years. “Even though it’s just once a year, we all get back together on day one, and we go, ‘Oh, this works.’”
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival begins tonight at 8, at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, and repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. The program features Médailles Antiques for flute, violin and piano by the French composer Philippe Gaubert; Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Op. 4), for string sextet; and the Gran Partita (in B-flat, K. 361) for 13 winds and double bass, by Mozart. Tickets are $25, and a four-weekend ticket can be had for $85. Call 330-6874, visit www.pbcmf.org, or buy them at the door.