Conductor Rafael Payare keeps all parties happy

By Richard Anderson Jackson Hole Daily
Jul 19, 2019
Jul 19, 2019
0

GTMF - Rafael Payare — Guest conductor Rafael Payare will lead the Grand Teton Music Festival’s Festival Orchestra through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Friday and Saturday.
COURTESY PHOTO/

Guest conductor Rafael Payare will lead the Grand Teton Music Festival’s Festival Orchestra through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Friday and Saturday.
COURTESY PHOTO/

A conductor has a duty to three constituencies: the audience, the orchestra and the music.

“And the soloist,” added Rafael Payare, the guest conductor this week at the Grand Teton Music Festival.

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Contact Richard Anderson at 732-7062 or rich@jhnewsandguide.com.

Week 3 Wrap Up

The moon and the fireflies

In 1999, on his last night in the Tetons for the summer, Festival cellist Steven Laven took a nighttime stroll in Grand Teton National Park.

“There was a clear sky with a bright full moon,” Laven wrote in an email this week. “I parked at the String Lake lot and took the trail on the east side to the outlet of Jenny Lake. The water left gently at the shore, and the moonlight was reflecting off of the rippling water. This inspired the melody that I began to hum, an oscillating 16th note figure,” that can be heard throughout his piece for solo cello, “Moon Over Jenny Lake.”

Laven will open Thursday night’s Haberfeld Chamber Music Series concert with the piece, the first time it has been presented at the Grand Teton Music Festival, and an apt addition to the nature theme of the festival’s 58th season.

Also on the program is Dvorak’s "Terzetto in C." A terzetto is simply a composition for three voices, in this case two violins (played by Christopher Pulgram and Julianne Lee) and viola (Yang-Yoon Kim).

“Fireflies,” for piccolo and piano by TV and Hollywood composer Herman Beeftink (“Cheers,” “Gilmore Girls,” “The Simpsons Movie,” “X-Men Origins” and dozens more), will be presented by flautist Carole Bean and the festival's Associate Conductor Stephanie Rhodes Russell. “It is a rarity when you can hear piccolo in a totally melodic context,” Bean wrote in an email about the work. “The piccolo is used in the orchestra frequently for busy, technical passages, and audiences don’t get to hear the beautiful, romantic, melodic side.”

And Laven and Rhodes Russell will return to conclude the program with six selections from Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces,” a trove of 66 short works written originally for piano that evoke the land, the people and the tales of the Norwegian’s homeland. The duo will play a few favorites — including the opening tune, “Arietta,” and the mischievous “March of the Trolls” — as well as some lesser-known pieces.

Thursday’s concert starts at 8 p.m. at Walk Festival Hall. Tickets cost $30 for adults, free for students. For information, call 733-1128 or visit GTMF.org.

Meet young Beethoven on Tuesday

Before the Ludwig von Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the last string quartets, there was Beethoven the student and Mozart devotee.

Ahead of this weekend’s orchestral performances of Beethoven’s heroic "Symphony No. 5" (see above), a dozen Grand Teton Music Festival players will take the audience at St. John’s Episcopal Church back to that early version of the composer with his "String Quartet No. 1 in F major," a bridge between the high classical training he received from Joseph Haydn and Antonio Salieri and the deep dive into the soul he would make all by himself.

Two pieces are set to round out Tuesday night’s program. Flautist Carole Bean, in the Tetons for her 25th season, will start the recital with the "Concertino" (1925) by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) — a remarkable modernist whose career was cut short by the Nazis in 1942 — and members of the brass section will play one of Russian Victor Ewald’s quintets.

Written for flute and piccolo, viola and upright bass, the Concertino combines “beautiful, exotic Eastern European folk” tunes with odd, shifting meters, according to Bean, who will play both wind instruments in this performance, with violist Philippe Chao and bassist Robin Kesselman.

While Ewald (1860-1935) wrote a fair amount of music, he is today almost exclusively known for his four brass quintets, the third of which will be played by trumpeters Russell Campbell and Charles Daval, horn player Gail Williams, trombonist Jay Evans and tuba player JaTtik Clark.

The evening will culminate in Beethoven’s "String Quartet No. 1" (actually his second, though it was published as No. 1), with violinists Ling Ling Huang and Tomoko Iguchi, violist Caroline Gilbert and cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski.

The music starts at 6 p.m. Tuesday at St. John’s Church. Admission is free, but tickets are required; call 733-1128 or visit GTMF.org for details.