By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
Beethoven’s string trios, a celebration of Scott Joplin and performances by festival musicians old and new are among the highlights of this year’s Sitka Summer Music Festival which kicks off next week.
“I enjoy this, more than anything else I do,” said festival artistic director and Grammy winner Zuill Bailey. “I live for it.”
The festival opens next week with Meet the Artists 6 p.m. Tuesday at Stevenson Hall, Cafe Concert 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Mean Queen, and Bach’s Lunch 12:15 p.m. Thursday at Odess Theater.
The first regular Evening Concert, 7:30 p.m. June 7, will highlight the works of American ragtime composer Scott Joplin. A brunch cruise 10 a.m. Saturday June 8, and the evening concert at 7:30 p.m. the same day will feature Beethoven’s String Trios. The weekend will be rounded out with a free Family Concert and Ice Cream Social 3 p.m. June 9 at the Sheet’ka Kwaan Naa Kahidi.
Christian Colberg, Jia Kim and Martin Sher perform at a Sitka Summer
Music Festival concert at Centennial Hall in 2017. All three will return this
summer. (Photo by Christine Davenport)
Bailey spoke to the Sentinel from the Phoenix airport, where he was traveling from the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane, Wash., where he is artistic director, to his home in El Paso, Texas. He plans to pick up his teenage sons there to bring to Sitka, where the family will spend part of the summer. He said he looks forward to their time in Sitka every year.
“I live for investing in community,” Bailey said. “Living in Sitka for the summers for me – it’s not really an investment but a thrill.”
The month of June is packed with festival events on every day except Mondays. There are 15 special events and concerts, plus regular evening concerts the first three Fridays and Saturdays. For the final week, the evening concerts will be Thursday, June 27, and Friday, June 28. Evening concerts are presented at Harrigan Centennial Hall, starting at 7:30 p.m.
Pianist Richard Dowling will open next weekend with a concert of Scott Joplin compositions from the early 1900s, and returned to public awareness in the 1973 movie “The Sting.”
(The Sentinel will have a separate story about Dowling and the Joplin concert next week.)
Bailey, who plays cello, will be joined by Kurt Nikkanen (violin) and Scott Rawls (viola) at Thursday’s Bach’s Lunch and at the June 8 evening concert, playing all of Beethoven’s string trios. The June 8 brunch cruise will include excerpts from all five trios and a discussion on how Beethoven was evolving as he wrote them.
Bailey said the five trios are a bit of an “oddity,” composed as a “warm up” for the composer’s later string quartets.
“He was trying to find his form, what he wanted his music to be,” Bailey said. “You can really hear his evolution. I hope people can hear all five.”
SSMF Executive Director Kayla Boettcher said, “He was composing in the shadow of Haydn, who had already written some pretty amazing string quartets. So Beethoven decided to write string trios first to practice writing for small string ensembles, before he moved on to write his amazing series of quartets.” The 16 Beethoven quartets were featured at a previous festival, played by the Cypress String Quartet.
“The (trios) are certainly not inferior,” Bailey said. “They’re different; they’re exotic. ... The three instruments had to cover as much ground with not as many players. It means there’s much more work to be done on each instrument than a quartet. Adding one instrument changes everything.”
Sitka Summer Music Festival founder and first artistic director Paul Rosenthal will be back the week of June 9, and play violin and viola at the June 14 and 15 evening concerts. The same weekend will feature pianist Natasha Paremski performing the “notably challenging ‘pianist’s triathlon’ – Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit” (June 15), Boettcher said.
Cellist Evan Drachman, a regular at the Festival since the days when Rosenthal was artistic director, will be here the week of June 16 and perform at the June 21 and 22 evening concerts. Drachman is the grandson of the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Piatigorsky and famed violinist Jascha Heifetz were leaders of the master classes at the University of Southern California where Paul Rosenthal met many of the original Festival artists. Piatigorsky was a guest artist at the Sitka Festival in 1976. And Drachman now plays his grandfather’s Stradivarius cello, Boettcher said.
During the Festival the musician are housed at Stevenson Hall, owned by the Festival on the historic SJ Campus. The Festival is launching the final stage of a fundraising campaign to finish the renovation of the building, which Bailey hopes will become the year-round center of classical music instruction in Alaska.
“This is the final time to see Stevenson Hall as you know it,” Bailey said. “After the Festival we’ll be breaking ground (on the project).”
The Festival has $250,000 left to raise in the $4.2 million capital project, including the purchase of the building and the foundation and roof work that are already completed. The money raised so far has come from the Rasmuson Foundation, Murdock Charitable Trust, and several major gifts from Anchorage, Sitka, and a family in northern California. A groundbreaking ceremony is planned for July 21.
