SUN VALLEY, Idaho – Smack in the middle of the Gem State is a summer jewel that’s been polished up, to the delight of thousands, each August for the last 40 years. The Sun Valley Music Festival, situated in this flower-laden resort town of barely 1,800 inhabitants, is unlike, well, anything else in its posh surroundings: It’s entirely free. And when listeners in the festival’s gorgeous and acoustically elegant pavilion are added to those picnicking on the green sprawl beyond, attendance at any given concert can nearly double the size of the resident population.
This breathtaking valley floor sits 6,000 feet above sea level. The main attraction switches in winter: You can see the ski runs, rising to 9,400 feet, carved through the pines. It takes a few days for your breathing to adjust. Imagine being a tuba player here.
For the last three of its four decades, the Sun Valley Festival Orchestra — a congregation of musicians drawn from U.S. orchestras large and small — has performed under the baton of Alasdair Neale. Until recently, the British conductor was also music director of both the Marin Symphony in California and the New Haven Symphony in Connecticut. As concise as the festival, packed into less than four weeks, are its programs, generally three per week, each designed to last about an hour and each performed just once.
That efficiency does not preclude seriousness, or bravery. The remarkable focus and the ambition of Neale and his forces were witnessed in a span of three concerts, Aug. 11-14, attended by six writers from the Music Critics Association of North America invited for a close-up look at the festival. Conductor, orchestra, audience, and visiting critics jumped into deep water together when our week began with nothing less than Mahler’s vast, rigorous, perhaps tragic but certainly existential Sixth Symphony.
Typically, Sun Valley concerts get one generous rehearsal. The Mahler Sixth was said to have received three times that much preparation, and ultimately the ample consideration showed. Across its 85-minute expanse, the work’s four movements place great demands on not just the virtuosity but also the sheer concentration of a large ensemble. To convey the meticulously crafted, crucially energizing counterpoint, it’s all hands on deck, everyone on their toes all the time. What I found striking about this performance was how the precision only grew, and the intensity deepened, as the work progressed; rather than wearing down, Neale’s orchestra kept rising up.
That said, the performance began less than auspiciously. It seemed almost paradoxical in the beginning that Neale chose to conduct this monster symphony without a score: In the dark and tumultuous opening movement, he didn’t seem to have his bearings. Mahler’s massive, driving exposition lacked both light and shape; it was like a pages-long paragraph without rhetorical markings, the inflection points of commas, semi-colons, periods. Everyone was head down when heads up were needed.
And then, with the ensuing Scherzo, it all began to coalesce. Neale captured the music’s springing rhythm as well as its ardent singing line, the latter delivered by a large and superb group of woodwinds and by strings that now sounded opulent where they had seemed constrained. Similarly, the Andante’s songful radiance shimmered in the evening air. From an ensemble that packed the stage, Neale drew playing of eloquence, fluency, unity. It was quite beautiful.
Mahler’s prodigious finale for the Sixth Symphony comes like a mountain after rising foothills. It is long, exacting, spiritually charged, emotionally exhausting. Here befalls the existential consummation, the “tragic” turn for which the Sixth has been named; one senses the dusk between life and death, a prefiguring of the “Abschied” that crowns Mahler’s later song-symphony, Das Lied von der Erde. Neale led a purposeful account, penetrating and luminous. All heads were up, eyes on the horizon, in a performance that reached somewhere beyond.
Twice during this three-concert stretch, the festival saw a change of scheduled soloists, one announced well in advance but the other quite sudden. The latter instance brought in pianist John Wilson as a replacement on a day’s notice for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major, with cellist Amos Yang, assistant principal of the San Francisco Symphony, and violinist Jeremy Constant, assistant concertmaster in San Francisco and for the last 24 years concertmaster of the Sun Valley Festival Orchestra. On this occasion, Neale ceded the baton to Stephanie Childress, in her second summer as the festival’s associate conductor.
The Triple Concerto, from dead center of Beethoven’s beloved “middle-period” works, seems to be one of those pieces that are more rewarding to play than to witness. It is essentially a piano trio superimposed on an orchestra, and for all the brilliance of the chamber component, the concerto in toto always seems to lack vitality, concision, forward motion. Here, Wilson’s best efforts to blend with his new partners were thwarted by the diffuse tinkling of a lidless piano. Yang’s lovely solo to open the second movement made one wish Beethoven had written a cello concerto, just as his rousing out-front collaboration with Constant in the finale left one pining for a performance sans orchestra — say, the Archduke Trio. Childress conducted with grace and a clear sense of style, but this latter-day concerto grosso just wasn’t going to happen.
The most roundly satisfying moment among the three orchestra concerts came last with Brahms’ Violin Concerto. This time the stand-in soloist was Canadian-American violinist James Ehnes, who had replaced Leonidas Kavakos with enough lead time that even the festival’s comprehensive program book had it right. Ehnes delivered a performance of warmth, power, and lyric charm, matched by Neale and the orchestra on all points.
The 2024 Sun Valley Music Festival closed Aug. 22 with a concert featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
I’d have been happy to hang around for that performance. And quite apart from the music, I was enchanted by the ubiquitous flowers, a bright and variegated sea that sparkled under the valley’s warming sun.
