Guest post by Bratsche
My August Home Away from Home
Every August, I drive from my home in southwestern Washington to southern Oregon to play in the Britt Festival Orchestra. It’s a festival that was started over 40 years ago (this year was the 47th season) as a classical music festival. Over the years, it has grown to last several months (June-Sept.) and has lots of different kinds of music. The first three weeks of August, however, are solely classical music. The orchestra is made up of approximately 100 musicians from all over the USA, as well as from a few other countries. The musicians enjoy Britt so much that we tend to have about an 85-90% return rate each year.
Community support is an integral part of the festival. Most of the musicians are housed with a host family (a few musicians rent accommodations for themselves). So, the people of Jacksonville, Medford, Ashland and all the other very small towns in the area open their homes (and refrigerators and laundry rooms and everything else) to one or more musicians for the three weeks of the festival. The festival has a housing coordinator who matches up homes and musicians. Many of the musicians who have been playing for a while have “permanent” hosts, meaning people who host the musician every year and plan to do so for many years to come. As our conductor tells the audience every year, our festival could not happen without the generosity of our host families!
The setting is another part of what makes Britt special. The festival grounds are up high enough to have a good view of the valley stretched out below and the hills on the opposite side. The audience sits on a grassy hillside, with a few ponderosa pines towering overhead. If we’re playing a piece that ends quietly, the crickets are liable to be louder than we are by the end. My husband says that Holst’s The Planets sounds even better when you get to lie on your back and watch the stars appear and a shooting star or two go by while you listen! The orchestra performs under a shell*, which (mostly) protects us from the weather as well as providing a surface to help direct our sound towards the audience. I’ve always liked being outdoors, so being able to watch a sunset growing and glowing and fading while I play is wonderful.
We find out what we’re playing about 6 months ahead of time. In many orchestras (including this one), the music for the string players has the bowings put in ahead of time. Bowings means markings showing us which direction our bow is supposed to be going when we play. The point of that is to have each section sound as unified as possible. It also looks more harmonious (pun partly intended) if the bows are going the same direction. The bowed music is available to us sometime in late spring (varying from April to June). I don’t tend to really look at any of the music until late June at the earliest. I have played enough over the years to have a decent sense of which pieces will require the most work.
We play seven concerts over three weekends. We have three or four rehearsals for each concert. One or two of those rehearsals are just the orchestra, one is mostly focused on the soloist’s piece, and the dress rehearsal covers all the music for the concert. Six of our concerts are “regular” concerts and the seventh is a family concert, which is a program that’s intended for children and/or people who are new to classical music (and might be leery of a “serious” classical concert). Many of the musicians play so many family concerts during the year that they roll their eyes about doing another; but since I have two girls (ages 5 & 8) who attend the concerts, I get to see (and hear about for weeks and months) the great pleasure that the youngsters take in those concerts. My personal favorite of all our family concerts are the ones that have been done by the Magic Circle Mime company. They’ve come about three times in the years I’ve played. All of the artists (actors, mimes, musicians) who come do the family concerts are very passionate about sharing music with children and people who aren’t familiar with classical music.
A fun part of playing in any orchestra is getting to see and hear the soloists during rehearsals (not just concerts). Britt gets some pretty famous soloists. I would definitely say that all the soloists I’ve heard have earned their reputations as talented players. Beyond that, of course, personal preference for playing style and stage presence colors my reaction to their playing. There are certain players whose performances have stuck in my mind for things I want to emulate.
Lynn Harrell (cellist) played with the loveliest quiet sound (where the music called for it). It was soft but traveled beautifully and made me feel that he was inviting us all to lean in to hear what he had to say.
Midori (violinist) played with us this year. I was very curious to hear her, since she has a big reputation. In my opinion, she deserves all those accolades! She has such a lovely singing sound. Her playing is so expressive that all the technical parts of playing (changing bow direction, moving up and down the fingerboard, etc.) go unnoticed (even by someone like me who knows full well how difficult some things are to play).
Jon Kimura Parker (Jackie) and Jeffrey Kahane are two of my favorite pianists. Their playing is so full of life and laughter and joy (and amazing technical ability) that I always look forward to playing with them (they don’t play duets, they’re each on their own concert).
Gil Shaham (violinist) and Jian Wang (cellist) performed the Brahms Concerto for Violin, Violoncello & Orchestra (op. 102) with us not too long after they had recorded it**, which meant of course that they knew the music VERY well at that point. They had so much fun playing together that it was a blast to play with them. It was amazing to see and hear and feel their partnership in the music.
A few years ago, Samuel Ramey (Sam) and Frederica von Stade (Flicka) came to do an opera concert with us. Flicka is a wonderful, warm, laid-back person, and I’m glad to have had a chance to hear her sing in person. I will admit, however, that when I think of the pair of them, Sam stole the show (so to speak) with something he did during a rehearsal. He was singing an aria from Boito’s Mefistofele*** which starts with him chuckling to himself (heh, heh, heh — in a tuneful way, of course, it’s actually notated in the music). Normally those first few notes are a quiet precursor to the coming words. During our second rehearsal of it, however, he snuck up on the microphone so that his opening chuckle was still quiet but suddenly very, very present. The grin he then had on his face was hilarious to see, and I will forever remember his sense of humor. He also happens to have a lovely voice! Although, I will admit that I am biased. I played in an opera orchestra for a number of years, and I’ve found that I much prefer the villains. The hero (tenor)? You can have him.+ Give me the villain (bass-baritone) any day!
Another integral part of the festival for me is that my family gets to be involved. When I first started playing the festival, I was single. I enjoyed it because of our wonderful conductor (Peter Bay) and the chance to play lots of good music with a great bunch of people. Now that I have a family, all of that is still definitely true; and I also get to enjoy it from my family’s perspective. My husband comes to as many concerts as he can each year (he drives down on some of the week-ends), while my girls get to be there for the whole three weeks. I have very supportive parents and in-laws, who come watch the girls for me while I play.++ So now I have the added pleasure of seeing my girls on the hill enjoying the rehearsals and the concerts. They have come to most of the rehearsals and concerts since they were a year old. As far as they’re concerned, August equals Britt. They talk about it fairly frequently throughout the year. In fact, last year I had to keep telling my then 4-yr old that I wasn’t going to pack anything for Britt in January or February or…. She was welcome to, but I was going to wait until July! My girls are by no means the only kids on the hill. There are quite a few generations of Britt kids (kids who are at rehearsals while their parents play in the orchestra), which is part of the festival’s character from a musician’s perspective.
All of our rehearsals are open to the public; so if you’re ever in southern Oregon in early August, come on by and say hello. I’ve played Britt for 15 seasons now, and hope to play for many years to come.
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*Immediate picture that comes to mind is a giant clam-shell with fish and octopi and sea stars and other sea creatures playing instruments, however the reality is just a 3-sided building of sorts.
** Deutsche Grammophone recording here, if you want to get a CD and hear it yourself. Amazon.uk link here.
*** “Ecco il mondo” You can hear a clip from it, including his “regular” quiet chuckle here (track 8).
+ There are some amazing tenors out there too, of course.
++ My folks come the first week and my mother-in-law comes for the second two weeks. I have been blessed to always be able to find host families (the festival helps me when possible, but has no responsibility for finding a host family for my whole crew) who were willing to take in me and my girls and one or two grandparents.
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