With a fascinating program celebrating the change of seasons and the Americana of Sun Valley, Idaho, violinist Benjamin Beilman, festival Music Director Alasdair Neale, and festival musicians entertained large audiences at the Sun Valley Music Festival Winter Season. Three free concerts featuring the same program took place on Thursday-Saturday evening, March 19-21.
The setting was an intimate seating arrangement with small tables in a modern, 400-person auditorium at the Argyros Performing Arts Center in Ketchum, the town adjacent to the Sun Valley Resort. In the background and overhead, large video screens with shifting imagery created an impactful experience. The concert was so good, I saw it twice.
The Sun Valley Music Festival has entertained large audiences throughout its 42-year existence. This year’s main festival is scheduled from Monday, July 27, through Thursday, August 20. Most concerts take place at the marvelous Pavilion at the Sun Valley Resort. This festival has created an amazing sense of the community in Sun Valley, Ketchum, and the surrounding areas. The concerts are all free, and rarely exceed an hour in length. They’re intended to be part of an enjoyable evening that includes a meal and socializing. Alasdair Neale has been music director for 32 years.
Every year they have a short Festival in Winter in Ketchum over a weekend in March. In addition to concerts, the festival also offers lectures and community education programs. They bring in a curator to design and perform in the program. This year violinist Benjamin Beilman filled those honors.
Beilman is part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and will be performing piano trios in Chicago this Thursday with two extraordinary performers: pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel. Beilman also spent many years of his upbringing in Chicago. Imitating his older sister, he started playing violin at the age of five. The family moved to Chicago to allow them to study with Roland and Almita Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago.
In an interview, Beilman and Neale explained that, in designing the program, they were expecting a typical March in Southern Idaho with cold temperatures and a lot of snow on the ground. To get into the winter vibes, they programmed Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which ends with “Winter.” Surprisingly, the festival had never before performed this classical music chestnut.
This year’s weather was very different from normal, with near record daytime highs reaching the 70s and snow on the nearby ski area turning into mashed potatoes or melting completely. Also, the festival happened to coincide with the spring equinox, a fact that did not enter their programming calculations. With spring starting in the sky and on the ground in Sun Valley, programming The Four Seasons proved to be a master stroke.
The first half of the program was intended to focus on the American experience rooted in Sun Valley, including nature, great vistas, fun road trips, and general Americana. It started with a work for solo violin that Beilman commissioned in 2022: Sanguineum by Gabriella Smith, who was a student with Beilman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Beilman explained how Smith is an environmental preservationist who, in a restoration project, planted sanguineum on an abandoned navy air base in California’s bay area, where she’s from. Native to the western US, this red currant flower is a deciduous shrub that is beautiful in the spring.
Sanguineum allowed Beilman to show off many talents. It opened and closed with quiet harmonics and trills. It also featured quick and repeated bowing across all four strings, in which his hand and arm moved as if he were turning a crank shaft or spinning loom. He displayed a very joyful posture, constantly smiling.
The next piece was the only time Beilman was not onstage. Instead, Neale conducted my favorite piece of American music, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. This was the original version for 13 players that Copland wrote for the ballet of the same title. This work defines Americana like no other and ends with a set of variations on the Shaker tune, “Simple Gifts.”
I always have some trepidation when hearing a personal favorite. Will this performance be any good? The answer became clear in the opening measures when the musicians produced a sound that had more lushness than any other performance I’ve ever heard. I love the way Copland has the various instruments playing off one another, and, under Neale’s direction, these musicians interacted with such precision, it was like they had been playing together for decades.
Neale has a very restrained conducting style using just his hands without a baton. Most of the time, while moving his hands and arms, he was standing still, shifting his stance only occasionally. His rapport with the ensemble was great. Both performances were very enjoyable, with only minor hiccups.
The first half ended with Beilman and pianist Peter Grunberg playing Road Movies by American John Adams. Its three movements feature road trips in Adams' typically minimalist style. In the opening “Relaxed Groove,” Beilman would play quick, repetitive notes, while Grunberg’s hands stayed on top of one another on the keyboard, his body moving up and down on the bench to the very rhythmic beat.
The slow second movement “Meditative” had some of Beilman’s most beautiful playing of the evening. It allowed him to exhibit a deep, rich tone that other reviewers have noted. In our conversation, he said that a big part of his sound comes from the violin that he plays, a Guarneri instrument from 1740. This violin has an extraordinary provenance that includes Belgian violinist and composer Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe and Isaac Stern, who played it for 35 years, and several other notable virtuosi.
In “Meditative,” however, Beilman created the deep, rich tone using a different instrument. Adams requires tuning the low g-string one full tone lower to f. To avoid retuning during the concert, Beilman played a different violin. It didn’t matter. He still produced that deep, rich tone.
After intermission, Beilman led a ten-person ensemble through Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which comprises four violin concertos built around texts describing various aspects of “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter.” I have never been all that crazy about this work. A sign of a great performance is one that piques my interest, and that’s exactly what happened on Thursday and Friday night.
Beilman showed off great technique leading the ensemble. These four concertos require unbelievable virtuosity, and not just from Beilman. There were many occasions when he would interact with the four other violins to imitate bird calls, or the lower strings to produce thunder. There were several instances when he would pair off with one of the other players creating other great effects. Beilman’s fingering, bowing, constant smile resulted in excellent music making and absorbing visuals.
As part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Benjamin Beilman is performing at Chicago’s Harris Theater this Thursday. He will be performing piano trios by Schubert, Shostakovich, and Mozart with pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel. Harris Theater, Thursday, March 26, 7:30 pm. For more information, click here.
The Sun Valley Music Festival will run from Monday, July 27, through Thursday, August 20. It is quite an amazing experience. For more information, click here.
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