PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — Over the past 42 years, the Olympic Music Festival has matured into one of the Pacific Northwest’s premier summer chamber-music festivals. Founded in 1984 by Alan Iglitzin, a Philadelphia Orchestra violist who co-founded the Philadelphia String Quartet in 1960, the festival initially took place in a spacious, partially open barn in Quilcene, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula. In 2016, it moved to Fort Worden in Port Townsend, where it continues under the leadership of its second artistic director, pianist Julio Elizalde, in partnership with the Centrum Foundation.
For much of the last decade, the festival has run a two-week Olympic Chamber Music Fellowship that offers young musicians the chance to study and perform with professionals. This year, six fellows had four opportunities (Aug. 16, 17, 23, and 24) to collaborate with violinists Ray Chen and Jessica Lee, Elizalde (who collaborates often with Chen and Sarah Chang), clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, violist Dimitri Murrath, and cellist Matthew Zalkind.
The final weekend’s concerts mostly featured a different crop of top-flight professionals: violinists Steven Copes (concertmaster, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra) and Sandy Yamamoto (Butler Trio), violist Jonathan Vinocour (principal, San Francisco Symphony), cellist Efe Baltacigil (principal, Seattle Symphony), Elizalde, and Elizalde’s final teacher, pianist Robert McDonald (whose distinguished teaching career at Juilliard and Curtis is complemented by decades as an award-winning soloist and collaborative pianist).
Because the festival rarely programs 21st-century music, I leaped at the opportunity to review Aug. 30’s Dark Passions concert, which mated Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor and Rachmaninoff’s equally effusive Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 19, with Thomas Adès’ Three Berceuses for Viola and Piano from his 2018 opera The Exterminating Angel.
Adès’ Berceuses are lullabies written to accompany the opera’s increasing death toll. Far more than in pianist Kirill Gerstein’s recording of one of the Berceuses, Vinocour and Elizalde brought out the music’s haunting sadness and profundity. Utilizing a number of expressive techniques, including playing sul tasto and sul ponticello, Vinocour created a compellingly eerie atmosphere that, starting with lines drained of all vibrato, were permeated with quiet despair and death. Elizalde was equally expressive, intensifying the music’s inherent emptiness.
Thanks to Baltacigil and Elizalde, the concert’s highlight was not the Franck Piano Quintet, around which the afternoon concert was constructed, but rather the four-movement Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. Baltacigil sang his way through the cello part, his instrument literally shaking with perfectly controlled emotional outpourings. Each of the sonata’s many heart-tugging themes was optimally phrased as one huge arc, their melodies underscored by the innate longing at the center of Baltacigil’s resonant tone.
Elizalde proved the master of expressive plasticity, his frequently varying tempos and dynamics guided by Rachmaninoff’s romantic sensibilities. At times, his phrases flowed like tears, several passages of intentionally glistening high notes further underscoring the yearning at the music’s core.
The duo’s shocking cessation of emotional intensity at the end of the sonata’s first movement left the audience virtually breathless until the beginning of the second movement. Save for one brief passage of the ensuing Andante in which Baltacigil’s double-forte emotional cascades produced a slight hardness of tone in the high range, his playing was sublime. The concluding movement was gorgeous.
At one point, the performance grew so quiet that all one could feel was the sonata’s tenderness. As the music grew increasingly passionate in the final movement, Elizalde and Baltacigil seemed to inspire each other to sink deeper into the music’s core and pull the audience along with them.
Was Franck aware that when he dedicated his maximally impassioned piano quintet to Saint-Saëns, who sight-read his way through the piece at the premiere, he was essentially thumbing his nose at Saint-Saëns’ desire to turn away from the romantic excesses of Wagner and instead create French music characterized by elegance and restraint? Regardless, Saint-Saëns was so alienated by the piece that he stormed off the stage, leaving the score behind. Nor were either his or Franck’s wife thrilled that the piano quintet seemed like a love letter to Saint-Saëns’ romantic interest at the time, composer Augusta Holmes.
Nonetheless, the piece was a huge success. It’s easy to see why. Franck wrote music of virtually relentless emotional intensity, its final movement so unceasingly emphatic as to leave no question of the ardor at its core.
Had Yamamoto, Copes, Vinocour, Baltacigil, and McDonald not played perfectly, with ideal intonation and consummate control, the performance could have easily deteriorated into one of over-the-top excess. Instead, they rose to the work’s many challenges, maintaining consistent beauty of tone while pouring everything they had into music that followed more with yet more and yet more still. It was hard to believe that most of them had rarely played the work before they began rehearsing it in Port Townsend.
