Delirium Musicum opened Newport Classical’s 57th Music Festival to a large and enthusiastic audience assembled in the Gilded Age Breakers Mansion on a hot and sizzling July 2nd evening, but the fire and excitement of this L.A. based ensemble of 12 international string players led by French violinist Etienne Gara proved even hotter. Gara describes himself as an artist “dedicated to crossing musical boundaries” by combining diverse musical styles and genres and intersecting with other art forms and artists in exciting and creative collaborations. Delirium describes its mission as “Strings Unbound: Delirium Musicum envisions a world inspired by the ecstatic interpretation of music.” It was just so last night as Gara led the ensemble more by dancing than conducting.
The program opened with an actual dance, the Intermezzo from Zoltan Kodaly’s Háry János Suite, distilled from his 1926 folk opera depicting the folk soldier-hero who spun tales of imaginary conquests of Napoleon during the Hussar campaigns. Both the opera and the suite are filled with the distinct idioms and rhythms of the hongroise or ungarischer Tanz, an amalgam of earlier regional and military dances that were later unified as national dances such as the Czardas and this Verbunkos, or recruitment dance. These unique characteristics typical of the Hungarian “slow-fast” dance developed personally exuberant expression in the Gianluca Bersanetti’s arrangement. The ensemble’s resident composer, he had arranged many of the works heard last night and was in attendance. He cleverly asked for an electric keyboard to impersonate Kodaly’s cymbalom (hammered dulcimer), later using it as various percussions and even an organ in some of the other pieces.
The keyboard in fact served as the opening 12 bell tolls at the stroke of midnight in Camille Saint-Saëns Op. 40 Dance macabre, originally scored for the harp as part of a very large French 19th century orchestra, here creatively and effectively nuanced for the smaller string ensemble in another of Bersanetti’s transcriptions. Gara’s solo violin playing the “devil’s tri-tone” (achieved by Saint-Saëns detuning the E string by a half-step lower to create the once forbidden interval of the augmented 4th or diminished 5th considered the devil’s tone in the Middle Ages) before launching into the wild and frenzied dance, was joined by the dancing, clicking bones of the raised dead, in Saint-Saëns score enhanced by the xylophone, here simulated by the keyboard.
This pairing of was but one of many that occurred throughout the evening that juxtaposed opposites: life and death, slow and fast, summer and winter, reality and fantasy. For each work the ensemble produced a full and vibrant soundscape, enhanced by the wondrous acoustics of the historic space of the mansion. This was on full display in the next work by violinist and composer Gabriella Smith, her Cactus-Yucca Scrub from Desert Ecology, part of a larger project by Delirium called Treeology, celebrating California’s three iconic species almost lost in the devasting wildfires of 2020. Composers Billy Childs, Steven Mackey, and Gabriella Smith respectively depicted the Redwood, Sequoia, and Joshua trees. Smith recorded the sounds of plucked barrel cacti, coyotes, and the surrounding nature, the musicians trekked out to the Joshua Tree National Park to play for and with the cactus-like tree (Yucca brevifolia) common to the Mojave Desert. Smith, an activist for climate solutions, said in a NY Times sponsored 2022 summit conference in San Francisco called “The New Climate” that “music is a very powerful tool for change, and for societal transformation, and for change…that we want to get up and dance and get to work…art is the thing that brings us together, that uplifts us and inspires us and not only speaks to our heads but speaks to our hearts.”
After a meditative Bersanetti setting of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1, which added subtle layers of rhythm and sound, the first half concluded with an energetic and explosive Summer from The Four Seasons Recomposed by Max Richter; its four minutes of power, sound and color minimally reconstructed of Vivaldi while remaining remarkably true to its roots. This piece truly deserves its own article exclusively devoted to it, but for the sake of brevity, this writer will move on to the shorter second half.
The shimmering tranquility and magic of Echorus by Philip Glass contrasted with the race against “Death” portrayed in Erlkönig, Goethe’s terrifying tale that so inspired 18-year-old-Franz Schubert’s Opus 1. Both pieces employed a constantly repeating rhythmic motive. Glass wrote an undulating sequence of arpeggiated chords in a 4-3-4-4 grouping played by two solo violins, dancing on the stage as lovers enfolded by rich harmonic waves of gentle sound. That reverie was all but forgotten in the wild gallop of the incessant triplets and punishingly repeated chords of a child’s ride toward death; Bersanetti’s dramatic arrangement gave the drama to its full scope despite the lack of a vocal line to tell the tale.
The next work contained its own pair, Jessie Montgomery’s Banner for String Quartet and String Orchestra, which she describes as “a rhapsody on the theme of The Star Spangled Banner…” but also drawing in themes of many nations and cultures, expressing the diversity of our age and “acknowledging the contradictions, leaps and bounds, and milestones that allow us to celebrate and maintain the tradition of our ideals.” (Jesse Montgomery) It was an especially for a Rhode Island audience, as it evolved from a 2009 commission by the Providence String Quartet and Community MusicWorks that wove together themes from our National Anthem with James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, dubbed as the Black National Anthem in the musical setting by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. The 2014 Banner essentially expanded on that concept in this 200-year-anniversary tribute to the original anthem penned by Francis Scott Key in 1814 describing the bombing of Fort McHenry in Baltimore by the British during the War of 1812 and set ironically to an English popular tune written by John Stafford Smith. This piece was rescored for full orchestra in 2017 and in that version given its first Rhode Island performance in 2021 by the Rhode Island Philharmonic.
The concert closed with Vivaldi’s Concerto in F Minor Op. 8 RV 297, Winter, clearly meant to pair opposite Max Richter’s Summer which had closed the first half. These two pieces form a part of what are commonly called The Four Seasons, although Vivaldi himself never used descriptor. He did, however, effectively evoke nature and its seasons, filling Winter with icy textures, often achieved through extended string techniques such as bowing on the bridge, which emphasizes the harmonics, while Gara’s slow movement depended on pristine purity of sound, avoiding an overly sentimental or Romanticized interpretation in favor of a more authentic and refined line truly expressive of the Baroque ideal. Its closing burst forth with fiery energy and boldly contrasting dynamics, bringing the audience to its feet, and eliciting an encore, the Mediterranean Misirlou, attributed to Greek-American composer Nicholas Roubanis. He transcribed the melody of unknown authorship whose title references an Egyptian woman in Turkish, Arabic and Greek languages. Roubanis’s version defines the song as “an Oriental fox-trot.”
Newport Classical Festival continues Friday night July 3rd with pianist Dimitry Shishkin, while the free to the community July 4th Patriotic Pops with Fenway Brass and Percussion will be moved indoors to Emmanual Church, 40 Dearborn Street, due to weather and heat. A full schedule may be found HERE.