For its 51st season, Manchester Music Festival digs even deeper into the intimacy of chamber music — and invites audiences to share the experience of music in literature with them.
“We not only have the opportunity for people to hear these fantastic concerts every Thursday for five weeks, with invited artists, but also our wonderful Young Artists, who have three concerts of their own,” explains violinist Philip Setzer.
Now in his second year as artistic director, Setzer was a founding member of the legendary Emerson String Quartet.
“There will be also some open rehearsals,” he said. “It’s really fantastic to watch the process, and then come back the next night and hear the performance.
“That’s something I’ve always enjoyed, too, you know,” he said. “With my wife being an actress, I’ve sat in on many rehearsals even from the very beginning of putting a play together and just watching how people interact and how things come together.”
“Manchester makes it possible to really sit close and hear what we’re saying and ask questions at a certain point when we take a break, and that kind of thing,” Setzer said. “Then seeing the final product is something really exciting.”
Manchester’s 51st season, “Music & Storytelling,” explores connections between literature, poetry, song and music. The five Thursday concerts, July 10 to Aug. 7, mine literary inspirations — momentous and subtle — behind works that include Mendelssohn’s String Octet, Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and Janáček’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”
Stellar guest artists include actors David Strathairn and Linda Setzer, soprano Christine Goerke and baritone Randall Scarlata, clarinetist Anthony McGill, flutist Emi Ferguson, violist Paul Neubauer, cellists Edward Arron and Paul Watkins, and pianists Michael Stephen Brown, Jeewon Park, and Gilles Vonsattel, among others.
New blood
While this is Setzer’s second year at the helm, Manchester Music Festival is introducing a new executive director, who began just two weeks ago. An award-winning arts and culture leader with more than 20 years of experience from Maine to California, David Whitehill’s passion for arts education and community engagement has shaped his leadership roles, including executive director of the Asheville (N.C.), Reading (Pa.), and Bangor (Maine) symphony orchestras, among others.
Whitehill and Setzer’s first in-person meeting was at the latter’s New Jersey home for lunch last year.
“He rang the right bells for me and vice versa,” Setzer said. “We just hit it off when we talked a lot about music and what we’re trying to do, talked quite a bit about my ideas, the artistic side of it. He was really excited about that and already had some ideas about how to bring some of my ideas to fruition. So, it’s gotten off to a very good start.
“Later, I had a very short conversation with him over a couple of matters, and I got off the phone and I said to Linda, ‘I really like this guy a lot. And I really feel like this is going to work.’”
“Let me say first off, Manchester is beautiful, it’s got breathtaking mountains, and it just feels like you have stepped into a postcard,” Whitehill said. “And I can tell you it’s the kind of place where you can take a stroll through town, grab a bite at a local eatery and feel the warmth of a close-knit community.
“And I think what’s special about the Manchester Music Festival is it takes that intimate, magical nature of chamber music and layers it in a town that’s just full of charm,” he said. “And what makes chamber music particularly special is that intimate nature, that closeness.
“It’s like a conversation between musicians where each one has an important voice, and no one is hiding in the background,” Whitehill said. “And I think that Manchester combined with chamber music makes that objectively special.”
Two for Faust
Setzer, who did the programming for the Emerson String Quartet, has taken a slightly different tack from last year for this year’s programs. Last season’s programs explored the meaning of Romanticism historically and how it developed.
“I’ve taken another idea for journey #2 which is exploring music and words and storytelling and looking at music that’s influenced by words,” Setzer said. “We’re starting in the Baroque era and moving through the Classical era, through the Romantic era again, and into 20th century, and ending with a fully staged performance of Stravinsky’s ‘L’Histoire du soldat,’ or ‘The Soldiers Tale.’”
Setzer’s research found a connection between the closing work of the first concert, Mendelssohn’s String Octet — which will be performed by Setzer and seven Young Artists — and the final Stravinsky.
“I had read in Larry Todd’s book about Mendelssohn that the composer played for Goethe when he was very young and that this Scherzo of the Octet was apparently inspired by a scene from (Goethe’s play) ‘Faust’ — in fact the whole octet was inspired by ‘Faust.’”
Mendelssohn’s Octet, influenced by “Faust,” is at the end of the first concert, and “L’Histoire du soldat,” Stravinsky’s portrayal of the Faust theme, ends the festival.
“I won’t make a bad pun and say it’s going to be a hell of a good time, but don’t miss it!” Setzer said.
In fact, Setzer performed the solo violin part in a fully staged production of “L’Histoire du Soldat” in his second year at Juilliard.
“It was conducted by, by James Conlon,” Setzer said. “And I remember the Devil was David Ogden Stiers (“M*A*S*H”), who passed away a couple of years ago, and he was a student there then. And I went back, and I found my program, and the soldier was Kevin Kline.”
“L’Histoire du Soldat” will be performed with the same intimacy as all Manchester programs.
“We’re going to try to get that feeling of the cabaret,” Setzer said. “I think that’s another, another thing that we can do at Manchester with the intimacy of that hall.”
Young Artists
Each summer, 10 exceptional young instrumentalists — four violinists, two violists, two cellists and two pianists — participate in the Young Artists Program. The immersive program provides the rare opportunity to work directly with guest artists and to perform with their mentors in festival concerts. Additionally, Young Artists showcase their talents in two concerts of the chamber repertoire, on July 20 and Aug. 3; and in a special concerto program on July 27. The Young Artists on Tour series also brings the musicians to venues throughout the region as part of the festival.
Perhaps most importantly, the Young Artists will benefit from an opportunity Setzer enjoyed as a young man at Vermont’s famed Marlboro Music Festival, rehearsing and performing with the veteran artists.
“I learned so much from that,” he said. “You know, just being able to sit and play when I was young, next to some of these iconic musicians, and just learning.
“It’s great to have an iconic musician sitting there with the score telling you what to do,” he said, “but it’s a very different experience when they’re actually sitting next to you and still telling you what to do — inspiring you because you’re sitting there playing with them.
“It takes it takes it into another dimension.”