CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif. — With the magical opening bars of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, the Carmel Bach Festival launched its 88th season July 12 by ushering its audience into what seemed like a dream world far removed from the heat, storms, and political tsuris of summertime America.
Weather-wise, Carmel certainly looked and felt like a different planet from the rest of roasting California — mostly overcast, at times faintly drizzling. With temperatures ranging from 54 to 62 F, it might have felt like home to the festival’s Norwegian artistic director, Grete Pedersen, not only due to the weather but also to the coastline, with its greenery and craggy, rocky outcroppings. Now in her third season, Pedersen continues to transform Carmel Bach into something more progressive than it had been while still keeping good old Johann Sebastian in her sights.
J. S. Bach’s encyclopedic, career-culminating work, The Art of Fugue, is a connecting thread in this year’s festival, with several concerts featuring just one excerpt as scored for one or more instruments in different combinations. Since Bach did not specify any instruments, that opened the field for everyone — from solo pipe organ to violin and cello, piano trio, string quartet, brass quintet, etc. However, the main theme of the festival is Dialogues, mainly meaning imaginary conversations between composers of their own times and up to the present day while also straying into other opportunities for communicating.
One astute, unifying feature of the festival was having the same quartet of vocal soloists participate in all three major masses on tap. That encourages good teamwork, forming another dialogue in itself. Soprano Clara Rottsolk, with her spinto timbre beaming through the orchestra, has been a go-to soloist at the last three Carmel Bach Festivals, and the always imposing bass-baritone Dashon Burton has inhabited the last two. New this year is mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz from Tijuana, Mexico, owner of a seductively creamy timbre that shone warmly whenever she was in the spotlight, and the sweet yet sturdy tenor of Brian Giebler.
While Pedersen had definitely upgraded the level of performance of Carmel’s Festival Orchestra over her previous two seasons here, it took awhile for this year’s ensemble to reach cruising altitude on opening night. The violins could handle the feathery fairy music of A Midsummer Night’s Dream really well, but when the two horns and timpani went into action, they tended to blot out the rest of the ensemble.
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite — always a welcome source of joy and spunk, with a modernist twist as Stravinsky imposes his acerbic wit upon several Baroque composers’ music — seemed a rehearsal or two away from total control over rhythmic unity. Yet the performance had spirit and fizz at just the right tempos while also contributing to the dialogue between centuries.
With Haydn’s not-often-performed Harmoniemesse, the closing composition on opening night, the Festival Orchestra found its bearings in league with the game Festival Chorale and the excellent above-mentioned vocal quartet.
Harmoniemesse is the last of Haydn’s 14 masses and his last major work, period, for after it was finished in 1802, the composer’s health deteriorated to the point where he simply couldn’t write anymore. (He had certainly earned his rest after 106 symphonies, 68 string quartets, 41 piano trios, 52 keyboard sonatas, 13 operas, and so much more.) The joyous grandeur of this succinctly drawn mass was amply projected in the Sunset Center Theater, the Gothic-arched headquarters for the main concerts.
The following afternoon (July 13) was devoted to another, more sprawling religious piece, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which happened to be his last major choral work, too. Since the B Minor Mass is mainly a cobbled-together anthology of reworked versions of earlier pieces, this constituted a sort of dialogue between Bach and himself.
For this performance, Pedersen reverted to many trappings of the period-performance practice (or historically informed performance) movement — string players applying little or no vibrato, Baroque oboes, a mostly inaudible theorbo, valveless trumpets, even a natural horn that kept going out of tune. On the whole, it was a bracing performance at swift tempos that just swept the constant counterpoint forward, where triple-meter sections were treated to infectiously swaying rhythms.
The Dialogues trope had all kinds of implications at this festival — like Stravinsky communing not only with Pergolesi, Gallo, and their friends but also Picasso in the form of projections of his original sketches for the first production of Pulcinella, or hearing a precursor of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and even Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen in Mozart’s early String Quartet No. 13, K. 173.
However, the biggest epiphany that I experienced after spending a few days here in Carmel occurred on July 15. Andrew Megill, the savvy artistic adviser and director of choral activities, who has been involved with the festival since 2008, came up with the idea of following yet another final choral work, Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, K. 626, attacca with Pēteris Vasks’ ethereal Dona nobis pacem. That made terrific sense because I’ve never been convinced by Franz Xaver Sussmayr’s completion of the Mozart Requiem; it seems to descend from the sublime to the ordinary whenever Sussmayr takes the baton, so to speak, from Mozart.
Yet going from the Requiem’s Lux aeterna without pause into the calm, beautiful, vibrating, spiritual sound world of Vasks had the effect of defusing Sussmayr with a 13-minute meditation on just the words that translate to “Give us peace.” It was ecstatic and definitely applicable to our troubled times, a surprisingly compatible dialogue spanning some 205 years between two composers of completely disparate styles.
Besides the main concerts, Carmel Bach 2025 also includes the usual plethora of satellite events, such as organ recitals, the traditional choral rituals at the Carmel Mission, chamber music, Tower Brass, and more. In the last main concert of the sequence, Pedersen takes Carmel’s alternate summer universe up to the stars and planets with Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. As always, the entire cycle of concerts repeats during the second week of the festival, culminating July 26 in the Greatest Hits-style “Best of the Fest” finale at the Sunset Center Theater.
