ROHNERT PARK - A five-year-old music festival is just a toddler, trying,
experimenting, falling down a lot.

Sonoma's Green Music Festival, now its fifth season, is different.
It has grown up in a hurry, to become a strong, handsome, impressive,
self-assured young adult.

In the benign dry heat, the Sonoma State University campus is a most
pleasant venue. For the first time, the festival is providing ambiance
galore, with free food and wine (Sonoma's Kendall-Jackson, no less)
under a big white tent.  The atmosphere is similar to Aspen's or some
old, established summer music festivals' - minus high prices and any
pretension.

The feel of the place may remind one of many mellow "music" festivals
around the country, where pop or popsified "classics" play in the
background, but at the Green Festival, Jeffrey Kahane's programming
is anything but that.  Without apologies in this "rural setting," the
festival director serves up Ravel, Shostakovich, Faure, Saint-Saens,
Schubert, and even - yikes! - contemporary chamber music.

Take the Sunday concert: it opened with a breathtaking performance by
the violinist Chee-Yun of Kevin Puts' "Arches," a brilliant new work,
written for her by the former California Symphony composer-in-residence.
A virtuoso piece, with substance, "Arches" is a series of caprices and
arias for solo violin, invoking Bach and Paganini, but an original work.

Chee-Yun, who has risen steadily in recent years to the top rank among
violinists, played the devilishly difficult piece (which she asked the
composer to make "challenging") with effortless grace.  You don't get
to see such work being "tossed off" like this while, at the same time,
experiencing the performer's total dedication to the music.

 From its current residence at Stanford came the St. Lawrence String
Quartet - the amazing violinists Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman, the
shy, self-effacing but highly effective violist Lesley Robertson, and
the quartet's new, impressive cellist, Chris Costanza - to perform the
relatively seldom-heard Dvorak String Quartet in C Major No. 11.

Accept for the somewhat fragmented Scherzo (the music, rather than
the musicians at fault), the performance was joyous and memorable,
well-deserving of the standing ovation (which seems to be an unvarying
habit in the Evert B.  Person Theater).  From the opening Allegro on,
the sound was warm, passionately romantic, varied in the second movement
by playfulness and elegance, later Nuttall becoming airborne repeatedly
in the Finale, played with maximum "vivace," and yet everything balanced
and true, nothing for show, everything for the sake of the music.

As Kahane joined the St. Lawrence in the second half of the concert,
for Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor, I fully expected a crowning finale
to an already marvelous afternoon, but it was not to be, not to my ears.

As to most of the others, the standing ovation after the Brahms was
louder and longer than the previous audience celebrations.  I can see
why.  Very big, very impassioned, very loud, the works was almost
Brahms-as-Wagner in a Solti interpretation...  and that's just a bit
too much.

The work's opening was quite beautiful, as if a sequel to that "perfect"
Dvorak, but soon "amplification" kicked in.  The Andante was simply
overblown, settled down to a fine blending of the strings with Kahane's
bright piano, the Scherzo and - especially - the Finale bringing way too
much visible and audible effort to a venue where nothing like that was
evident in either Chee-Yun's performance or the St. Lawrence's Dvorak
before.

The high point of a post-concert audience discussion with Kahane and the
quartet came in response to a question if the foursome have their arguments
and disagreements.  "We disagree on everything," Costanza began to reply
when interrupted by Nuttall's sharp "NO, WE DON'T!" Ah, the fun of summer
concerts...

For information about the rest of the festival, see
http://www.greenmusicfestival.org.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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