Eugene weekly., June 16, 2011, Page 20, Image 20

EW’S GUIDE TO THE OREGON BACH FESTIVAL 2011
T
hough the thrill of 2010’s 40th anniversary celebration
may have worn off, Eugeneans who enjoy the Oregon Bach
Festival can’t help but be excited about a variety of events
at this year’s program.
First off, it’s CELLO MANIA! See our story on p. 5 but
also note that anything that kicks off with Yo-Yo Ma and
includes the Portland Cello Project is going to get lovers of the low strings
happy — and that’s before counting cello hottie Alban Gerhardt, with the
Bach and Britten Cello Suites, in the mix.
And then, if you’re interested in the women, the festival offers a bit of an
olive branch to those often neglected by the classical side of things. Not
that you’ll see a lot of, or any, women composers, but both Marin Alsop
and Monica Huggett, of the Portland Baroque Orchestra, conduct some
big works that paint large canvases for famous women. When Alsop isn’t
covering Joan of Arc or Huggett conducting an opera about Dido, young
British conductor Matthew Halls (see story, p. 3) puts together a concert
honoring St. Cecelia, the muse of music. Returning for more family-friendly
fare is the Jamie Bernstein-narrated “We Are Women: A Bernstein Cabaret,”
which includes songs from West Side Story, Candide, Peter Pan and more.
Another former Eugene Symphony music director, Miguel Harth-Bedoya,
returns to the town with the Caminos del Inka ensemble; like Yo-Yo Ma,
that concert’s also sold out. But if you don’t mind sitting in the preschool
chairs, tickets are still available for the Caminos del Inka children’s concert
at 11 am on June 25.
This year, the Bach Fest premieres a fi lm series in partnership with the Bijou,
and the calendar contains everything from lecture events to the marvelous
Discovery Series to an organ concert of Harry Potter-inspired music (true!)
and of course the well-known youth choruses, the free On the House
performances and much more. This is a year with executive director John Evans’
stamp all over it, and it ends with a bang on July 10 as the Bach Fest orchestra
and choruses perform the monumental Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
— Suzi Steffen
Superhero, Saint, Believer
MARIN ALSOP CONDUCTS HONEGGER’S “JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE”
T
hat’s pretty much all one need say in Eugene,
where Eugene Symphony fans remember Alsop’s
tenure (1989-1996) with fondness and great pride.
Brett Campbell even wrote (on Tom Manoff’s site; read
it here: http://bit.ly/l50WJH) that “Eugene was a major
entrance ramp to a career that’s made her the fi rst woman
appointed music director of a major American orchestra
(Baltimore) and a regular guest conductor of the world’s
greatest orchestras.”
Alsop is also a regular on NPR (http://n.pr/mpmYKC),
where she sometimes fences adroitly and affectionately with
Scott Simon, and the BBC’s Radio 3.
But the beloved conductor hasn’t made an appearance,
ever, with the city’s other most famous music-related
experience, the Bach Festival. That was all about the timing
of the symphony’s schedule.
2 | OBF’11
“The Bach Festival has an excellent reputation, and I
admire Helmuth tremendously,” she says, “but I was never in
Eugene in the summer, so I have no preconceptions about the
festival at all.”
When OBF Executive Director John Evans announced
that Alsop would be conducting a large-scale piece at this
season’s announcement, gasps went up from the faithful
audience. That’s despite the rarity of the work she picked
— French composer Arthur Honegger’s “Joan of Arc at the
Stake,” or “Jeanne d’arc au bûcher.”
The 1938 part-spoken, semi-staged performance piece/
oratorio (the Bach Fest has engaged actors from the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival) includes several soloists representing
young Joan and her favorite saints, the festival chorus, the
festival orchestra, the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, a
children’s choir and an electronic instrument called an ondes
Martenot.
Alsop, who has a history of exploring new or rarely
performed music, found her inspiration in a different place
for what’s now called “The Joan Project” — it premieres in
Eugene, at the OBF, but moves to Baltimore, Carnegie Hall
and the Barbican in London in 2012 to celebrate the 600th
anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc.
“I’ve always been curious about the piece,” she says.
When her son started reading about Joan of Arc for school,
Alsop’s curiosity increased. She began reading more about
Joan while thinking about her plans for the 2011-2012
season at Baltimore, where she’s music director (and the
fi rst woman to head a major U.S. orchestra). That settled it.
“I built my season in Baltimore around the theme of
Joan of Arc and revolutionary women, women in leadership
positions,” Alsop says.
At the same time, the Bach Fest had long wanted to get
Alsop on board for a performance. “They very graciously
said, ‘What would you like to do?’ and I put this forward,
and they said yes,” she says.
“This” isn’t just any work. Honegger’s score calls for
a variety of skills from musicians, choir and actors, not to
mention the conductor. Alsop says that all of the different
forces involved in the piece will keep her on her toes.
“Every conductor has conductor’s disease,” she says.
That’s a condition in which experienced conductors start
to want larger and larger challenges. “I’m not immune
to that,” she says somewhat wryly. “I enjoy working with
large forces, and this piece has everything in it.”
The composer wanted to put something of his time
in the piece, not just hearken to the early 15th century.
“Honegger was a composer who abhorred elitism,” Alsop
says. He included folk tunes that people of the time would
know, and he added other then-contemporary instruments.
by Suzi Steffen
For instance, he replaced the French horns with saxophones
to give the score a jazzier sound.
Then there’s that ondes Martenot, an electronic
instrument invented by Maurice Martenot in 1928, the same
year as the theremin, also an earlier electronic instrument
and with some of that more common instrument’s
cinematic sound. Alsop notes that Honegger composed a
lot for the movies, which also infl uences his sound. Ondes
Martenot player Cynthia Millar will come to Eugene for
the performance, bringing her own instrument. Alsop
says she’s looking forward to dealing with the unusual
instrument, which she likes a bit more than the theremin.
“With a theremin, you approximate where the pitches
are, and it’s quite complicated and hard to be accurate,”
she says. The ondes Martenot — which, Alsop says,
Radiohead has used in a few songs — has a keyboard
and three different speakers, and it’s got more accuracy
than the theremin. “It’s an incredibly cool sound, sort of
otherworldly,” she says, adding that Honegger uses it for
the fi rst time in the score to imitate the howling of a dog.
Claudel’s poetic libretto tells Joan’s story in fl ashbacks.
She’s at the stake, condemned to death by smoke and fi re,
basically for refusing to wear what was then designated as
women’s clothing. “That’s the most banal sense of threat
from a woman, wearing men’s clothes,” Alsop says. Of
course, Joan also said that she was getting her inspiration
directly from God and from saints, and no teenage shepherd
girl — whether she led an army that beat the English at the
end of the Hundred Years War or not — was going to show
up the Catholic Church hierarchy like that.
Alsop says that although some things in the work
resonate with 21st-century life, that’s not why she picked
it. “War is a complicated issue, always, and the people who
lead these wars are controversial fi gures,” she says. “But
ultimately, really, the piece stands on its own. We don’t
have to engage in a controversial discussion to enjoy the
piece.”
Though the libretto begins with Joan at the stake, it
proceeds inventively and dramatically through the past.
Alsop says that it’s “almost like a cinematic fl ashback.”
Despite the grimness of the opening and fi nal scenes, “Joan
of Arc at the Stake” also contains what Alsop describes as
“an incredible sense of humor,” including jokes about the
names of some of the cast.
“It’s a wonderful piece that’s got tremendous variety,”
Alsop says, though she also knows from experience (and
perhaps from some of her own leadership) that Eugene
audiences can go for experiments. “They’re very educated,
discerning, involved and curious audiences,” she says. “I
always love coming to Eugene.” ◆
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