As he prepares for the 60th anniversary season of the Sarasota Music Festival, music director Jeffrey Kahane is looking to change things up in unexpected, unplanned ways.
The festival, which brings 60 young musicians (known as fellows) to Sarasota for three weeks each June to train, study and perform with a rotating roster of dozens of professionals, will have more of an improvisational feel this year, while also acknowledging traditions established with the creation of the festival in 1965.
Kahane said the lineup of programs and performances will be a game-changer.
“We’re doing something this festival has never done before, bringing into the fabric of the festival a lot of different kinds of music,” he said. That includes standard classical pieces, along with jazz and bluegrass.
“There’s been a remarkable phenomenon happening in the last couple of decades. Many of the finest classical musicians are also playing jazz and bluegrass. Cellist Mike Block plays all kinds of different music. Violinist Tessa Lark plays bluegrass.”
And Robert Levin, the pianist who was Kahane’s predecessor as festival music director, “is probably the greatest living example of one kind of improvisation. I don’t know that he plays jazz, but I know he could. But when it comes to improvising Mozart and Beethoven, there is no one better,” he said.
Improvisation will be at the heart of the second week of the festival, which will feature Kahane, Lark and Block performing “Improvisation on the Largo from Dvořák’s ’New World Symphony’” at the second Artist Showcase Concert. There will be more improvisational pieces during the “American Soundscapes” concert on the second Saturday, with Block performing his own “Iniche Cosebe.” The concert also includes conductor Teddy Abrams’ arrangement of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” along with clarinetist Charles Neidich highlighted in Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.
Kahane said musicians “these days are truly musical polyglots. They like being able to speak different musical languages because it opens you up to other worlds.”
He recalls that when he spent a year at Juilliard at 18 or 19 “I was definitely not one of the strongest pianists there. I was good enough to get into Juilliard but there were people who could play rings around me in big show pieces.”
But when the students were taking a class in keyboard harmony, learning to break down harmonic patterns and skills beyond those needed for a Beethoven sonata, “the teacher asked us to improvise a 16-bar waltz in C major. Of the 15 of us, I was the only one who could do it. Not one of them had that skill. That was an important moment for me. I might not be able to play Liszt etudes the way they could, but they couldn’t improvise if their lives depended on it.”
Celebrating the beginning
The festival opens at 4 p.m. June 2 with a program that includes “Le Rossignol en amour” by Francois Couperin, which Kahane said was on the first program of the first festival.
“That is actually a pre-festival concert, with the fellows arriving that day, but we conceived this to represent the past, present and future of the festival, and we have various people who are faculty alumni,” he said.
For years, many of the same faculty members took part in the festival every summer. Kahane has been trying to mix up who teaches each year.
“I’m lucky that my colleagues are very gracious and they understand the importance of rotating off and on. They’re always happy to come back,” he added.
There will be 18 new faculty members this year, compared to 12 last year, and they include such prominent symphony musicians as Jennifer Montone, principal horn for the Philadelphia Orchestra; Cassie Pilgrim, principal oboe for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; Demarre McGill, principal flute for the Seattle Symphony and Teng Li, principal viola for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition, Sheryl Staples, principal associate concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, is returning to the faculty after nearly 30 years.
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The lineup also includes the Borromeo String Quartet (featuring festival alum Melissa Reardon on viola), and alumni soloist Rachel Breen performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with conductor Stephanie Childress. Jasmine Choi, a former fellow and orchestra soloist, will be performing in a June 20 concert.
There also will be three Rising Stars concerts highlighting the fellows, while guest artists and faculty members are featured in Thursday concerts. Friday and Saturday concerts are at the Sarasota Opera House and other programs are in Holley Hall in the Beatrice Friedman Symphony Center.
Tickets range from $15-$25 for Rising Stars programs and $30-70 for other programs. For more information: 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org
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