Heart and Soul of the Knowlton Festival - Kent Nagano

by Paul E. Robinson

Le Chapiteau was filled to capacity and the sun was shining brightly on Sunday morning when Kent Nagano gave the downbeat for Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Two hours later, after the closing chords of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, it was clear that the Knowlton Festival had ended twelve days of fine music-making in triumph. Several hundred audience members stayed after the concert to enjoy an excellent buffet lunch served in the Chapiteau lobby. From the comments I overheard, the combination of beautiful music, good weather and tasty food had made believers of nearly everyone.

Brahms Symphony # 1 Concludes Cycle
In this final concert of the Knowlton Festival 2009, Kent Nagano and the OSM concluded their Brahms cycle with the magnificent Symphony No. 1. Today's performance was of a piece with those which had preceded it. Nagano likes his Brahms lyrical and transparent. In all his readings, one notices a wealth of detail often passed over by other conductors.

That said, to my mind, Nagano’s approach to the first movement of this particular symphony was a little sleepy. The second movement began extremely slowly and I wondered whether it could be sustained. It was! The OSM strings adjusted their bowing and, in the case of the solo wind players, dug deep for extra breath to carry them through the long lines. The horn and violin solos were exquisite.

The last movement is really the heart of this masterpiece and Nagano shaped it beautifully. The whisper-soft pizzicati were perfectly coordinated. Scarcely a sound was heard from the wholly attentive audience. The performance ended in a blaze of sound with particularly vigorous contributions from the OSM timpanist.

June Anderson, Sumi Jo and Susan Platts Sing Strauss
Every festival concert this season featured vocal music. On this occasion, we heard soprano June Anderson in Beethoven’s Ah! Perfido Op. 65, and in the "Marschallin’s Monologue" from Act I of Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss. To cap the evening, Anderson was joined by soprano Sumi Jo and mezzo-soprano Susan Platts for the final scene from the same opera. Anderson and Sumi Jo are seasoned veterans, and Canadian Susan Platts held her own in this distinguished company. Nagano accompanied the artists with characteristic sensitivity, giving the audience music-making on a consistently high level.

Kudos to Maestro Kent Nagano
I had the privilege and the pleasure of attending nearly every concert in this year’s festival. It became obvious to me early on that much of the success of the Knowlton Festival depends on the artistic vision and energy of one man - Kent Nagano.

My own rough analysis suggests to me that, during the twelve days of the festival, Nagano must have commuted from Knowlton to Montreal and back at least a dozen times. Conducting seven concerts, Nagano must have been involved in at least twenty rehearsals of one kind or another, and yet, at each festival performance, he appeared fresh, involved and in total command. And let’s not forget that just days before the Knowlton Festival began, Nagano flew into Montreal from Germany, after an arduous series of opera performances – with very different repertoire - in Munich. And right after the Knowlton festival, he heads to Italy for performances of Don Giovanni with Canada’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

There’s more than energy and artistic breadth to admire about Nagano. From a musician’s perspective, his technique is exceptional. You may notice that while many conductors keep both arms in motion doing pretty much the same thing, most of Nagano’s conducting is done with his right hand. You may also notice that the right hand moves in very carefully circumscribed motions. Most musicians prefer a conductor who is not flailing his arms all over the place, one whose gestures are clear and precise. In this respect Nagano is the ideal conductor. He gives the musicians what they need to give the best of themselves. In addition, he is - in his quiet and diplomatic way - absolutely insistent on getting what he wants. Musicians don’t mind being pushed and disciplined to a certain extent, as long as the person doing the pushing is well-informed and confines his pushing to musical matters. Again, this is an accurate description of Nagano.

Knowlton Festival Here to Stay?
The Knowlton Festival was launched last year by Kent Nagano and local businessman Marco Genoni to celebrate the glories of bel canto. Nearly all the concerts were given on successive weekends. This year, the repertoire was broadened and many more concerts were added to give music-lovers something to enjoy every night of the almost two-week long festival. Perhaps the expansion was a little too ambitious - the weeknight concerts drew smaller audiences; on the other hand, the festival certainly maintained a presence in the community it didn’t have last year.

As much as I enjoyed this new and expanded Knowlton Festival, I harbor some lingering concerns regarding its sustainability:

Maestro Kent Nagano is clearly the heart and soul of the Knowlton Festival; what will happen if he decides to leave the OSM? Would he continue his affiliation with Knowlton? Remember that the Lanaudière Festival lost Nagano and the OSM to Knowlton because Nagano is committed to being in Munich in July. How tempted will Nagano be to take on opportunities that will limit his appearances with the Knowlton Festival in the coming years?

And how long can anyone operate a summer festival featuring a major symphony orchestra in a small hall seating 850? I can’t think of any festivals anywhere in the world that can pull this off. Most successful festivals utilizing a small hall engage a student or training orchestra. A full-sized professional orchestra typically increases festival operating costs, to the point where halls seating thousands are required to balance the budget. Of course private donations and government grants are always required to make up the difference, but the fundraising challenge the Knowlton Festival has given itself appears almost insurmountable. Hopefully, festival organizers are already busy developing a sustainable long-term concept.

Festival Programming Too Many Missed!

On the penultimate day of the festival I heard some fine singing by soprano Marianne Lambert and tenor Juan Noval-Moro. Unfortunately, only about 50 people attended this ticketed concert at Chapelle St-Édouard.

I also took in part of an excellent - and well attended - master class by conductor and coach Massimiliano Muralli in West Brome. Muralli walked some young singers through excerpts from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the expertise he shared with them (and the audience) was invaluable. He emphasized the importance of language in opera – accenting Italian correctly and really understanding the meaning of the words; the need for singers to respond to the harmony in the music and to what the orchestra is “saying”; and the importance of controlling volume to produce a more beautiful sound.

Finally, I had the pleasure of seeing a wonderful children’s opera called Orfea and the Golden Harp. This was a Jeunesses Musicales Canada presentation featuring a Toronto-based group called Theatre Cotton Robes. The two performers smoothly alternated French and English and their singing and costume changes kept the children in the audience enthralled. Much of the music was taken from well-known operas. This was a fine introduction to opera and should have been seen by more people. Again, there were fewer than fifty people in the church. Perhaps a greater effort could have been made encourage parents and children in the area to attend. It would be wise, both in terms of music education and audience development, to invite this nifty little troupe back to the festival again next year. But next time make sure that local schools are alerted! Who knows? Perhaps the local school board would even consider sharing some of the cost!

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

Knowlton Festival 2009: The Incomparable Sumi Jo in Bellini’s La Sonnambula

by Paul E. Robinson

Kent Nagano (photo: above) is music director not only of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM), but also of the Bavarian State Opera. His operatic interests are broad and all-encompassing, and he is always looking for new challenges.

For the Knowlton Festival, Nagano has chosen to focus on one particular aspect of operatic literature, the so-called bel canto composers who flourished in Italy in the early part of the nineteenth century. Nagano’s interest in this music paid great dividends last year with very good performances of Bellini’s Norma. This year we heard another Bellini opera, La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), dating from 1831. Again, Nagano delivered the goods.

La Sonnambula and much else in the bel canto repertoire has been mercilessly parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan. The stories are silly and the music too often begins to sound like the same simple-minded patterns repeated over and over. These operas also became corrupted by self-promoting divas who took the elaborate ornamentation to the realm of total absurdity with their own interpolations. In recent years singers of the stature of Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland and others showed that when one makes a real effort to get back to what the composers intended, many of these operas can be seen in a new and positive light.

Festival Celebrates Unique Beauty of Classic Bel Canto
Nagano is doing for the bel canto operas what the period instrument specialists have been doing for music from earlier periods. He is searching for the correct style of singing and orchestral playing. He has discovered that Bellini’s operas are less like early Verdi and more like what came before in Schubert and Mozart. This means toning down the bombast and easing up on the vibrato, especially in the string playing. It also means shortening the notes. The result is that the Bellini orchestra becomes a somewhat more robust classical or Mozart orchestra. Similarly, the singing is scaled back to become more lyrical and far more intimate.

The Knowlton Festival has become the summer home of the OSM but even this fine, hard-working ensemble has limits in the number of services it can provide. For La Sonnambula the OSM is replaced by a ‘Festival Orchestra,’ made up of some of Québec’s finest free-lance players. I have no idea how much rehearsal was needed, but the results were very fine indeed. The Festival Orchestra responded to Nagano’s meticulous direction as if they had been playing together for years.

Sumi Jo Heads Cast of Consummate Bel Canto Stars
Performances of La Sonnambula are usually mounted as vehicles for star sopranos. There is no doubt that without a first-rate singer in the role of Amina, the production is unlikely to be successful. At last year’s festival, Sumi Jo (photo: right) was sensational in a concert of operatic excerpts and this year she easily topped that appearance. Her virtuosity was nearly impeccable and her soft singing, exquisite. In the tradition of the finest bel canto artists, she is able to use the ornamentation to convey the feeling of the moment, whether it be joy or sadness or something in between.

She was not alone. Nagano had chosen a superb cast, each of whom was well-schooled in bel canto style. Tenor Barry Banks has technical challenges of his own in the role of Elvino and tossed them off without any difficulty. Riccardo Zanellato as Rodolfo was a commanding presence and cultivated a conversational style of singing perfectly suited to the role. There wasn’t a weak link in this fine cast and the OSM Chorus, functioning in the opera much of the time as a sort of Greek chorus – G & S had a field day with this kind of thing – were precise and animated.

Simple, Effective Staging and Surtitles Enrich Concert Version
This performance was a concert version of the opera with some effective bits of staging by François Racine. Another positive element was the surtitles system set up behind the chorus. The texts, in both French and English, were large enough to be easily read from the back of the tent and always related to what was being sung. We may take surtitles for granted in opera performances but in fact this job must be put in the hands of a highly-skilled professional. In so doing, the Knowlton Festival team enormously enriched the experience for its audience.

A second performance of La Sonnambula is scheduled for Saturday, August 15. Anyone with the slightest interest in opera, bel canto, and great sopranos should be there. At press time, there were a few seats available but when the word gets out about what Sumi Jo, Kent Nagano and their colleagues are up to in Knowlton, those who delay buying tickets may well be disappointed.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.