BELLINGHAM, Wash. — Founded in 1993, the Bellingham Festival of Music recently faced two major challenges. The turbulent years of the pandemic created unprecedented issues for all music presenters, but there was also a complicated business of succession and renewal. Michael Palmer, who founded the festival with cellist Robert Sylvester, retired in 2022, becoming conductor laureate, and the summer of 2023 was devoted to choosing his successor from a roster of guest conductors.
It turned out to be an easy decision. Marcelo Lehninger, the Brazilian-born conductor of the Grand Rapids Symphony, was selected for the job, and with this year’s festival, his first as music director, he has proved to be a remarkable fit.
Bellingham is a small, post-industrial community in the far northwest corner of Washington State, sandwiched between ocean and mountains, and so close to the Canadian border that it can feel like a suburb of Vancouver. It’s enjoying a renaissance of sorts: The mountainside campus of Western Washington University is a significant asset for the community, and retirees have flocked to the town in search of what, for the Pacific Northwest, is relatively affordable housing in an attractive setting.
What lured Lehninger to the idea of running a summer festival in a little, out-of-the-way city?
“I’ve been with the Grand Rapids Symphony for seven years. A summer festival makes perfect sense as a second job,” he said in a phone conversation before the start of this year’s festival. “I used to spend my summers in Tanglewood, and I loved being there, so when Bellingham approached me to come and conduct, I was quite excited to foresee a summer place where I could be with my family and also make great music. Even if it does threaten to rain a lot!”
From day one of his tenure, Lehninger fully understood the challenges and the rewards of the Bellingham initiative: “As music director of a full-time orchestra, you have to fund-raise, program lots of concerts, hire new musicians, contribute to marketing, all at the same time. Running a summer festival is very different. The orchestra comes from everywhere, but they want to work together, not making a lot of money but having a lot of fun.”
Fond memories of Tanglewood were certainly in Lehninger’s mind when he accepted the gig. “At Tanglewood, there was a lot of work but a real sense of camaraderie, hosting barbecues and socializing,” he said. “I come to Bellingham four times a year, but the festival is really like a vacation, despite everything I have to do.” He had to hit the ground running when his appointment was announced last summer. “I pointed out that we had very little time to put the summer together, so I decided to use my friends, because I could just call or text them and get a commitment. And, of course, conducting my friends is wonderful, because I already know what they can do on stage.”
But there are many complications with an orchestra assembled from players who work all over the continent. “We are all professionals with different orchestras,” Lehninger said. “Because the schedule is very tight, my attitude is that we all are here to have fun in a beautiful environment. We need to keep that as a focus. We created an artistic management committee, and I got together with the principals and told them we need to cohere as a real orchestra right from the first rehearsal, not just a bunch of people playing together. The principals came up with some names, and I suggested others. In the end, we have 15 new faces, and I think this will bring a new energy to the festival.”
Then comes programming. While more and more festival-goers make the concerts the anchor of a destination holiday, the local audience is fairly conservative, Lehninger said: “You need to know your audience. So I had a lot of conversations with audience members and board members, and the consensus was that we need to choose new works very carefully. For years the festival was very conservative in terms of repertoire. We present only five orchestral concerts, so there is very limited scope for new works and commissions. I have to build trust in the audience. So this year I programmed an unusual concert of Latin American music that will probably be new to almost everyone but is very audience-friendly.”
One of the festival’s strengths is its setting at Western Washington University, a near-perfect summertime venue on a leafy campus, with splendid views out over Bellingham Bay. There’s also an attractive concert hall that is decidedly on the small side. Lehninger takes this in stride: “The stage is too small for a huge orchestra. You can play intimately when it’s appropriate, but we simply can’t do pieces that demand huge forces.”
Lehninger has two immediate strategies to re-invigorate the festival. “We are starting a new conducting institute, starting small so it was possible to integrate it right away,” he said. “Two guest conductors will each do part of the last concert. In the near future, we plan to introduce an academy component. There was a lot of enthusiasm expressed for re-establishing the festival chorus, so we held auditions for about 50 singers and hired a new chorus master, and she brought in some people that she knows. We will start with a performance of Mozart’s great C minor Mass.”
Lehninger seems to have gotten everything right in his first season. There has been new music from a diverse array of composers. There are impressive soloists from his network of friends. He celebrated his roots with a selection of works with connections to Latin America, and he programmed a healthy number of popular classics designed to satisfy the local demand for orchestral favorites. It has all been very savvy.
For example, Lehninger’s second program, on July 6, was a sly exercise in Americana, starting with Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst, a particularly effective curtain-raiser featuring the orchestra’s strings. Montgomery has her own voice, and assured it is; her active, vibrant textures brought back memories of Michael Tippet’s work in the 1950s.
Next up was a showcase for Toronto-based pianist Stewart Goodyear, featured in Gershwin’s Concerto in F, which elicited a tremendous response. I had a couple of quibbles: The brass and percussion were a bit noisy in the small hall, and Goodyear’s interpretation, though vital and flashy enough, was somewhat monochromatic.
Lehninger’s achievement with Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (From the New World) was more impressive. In his try-out program last summer, he demonstrated a real feeling for the composer. Every musician in the ensemble knows the piece forwards and backwards, but playing with colleagues assembled from all over brought freshness and perhaps an extra measure of concentration. Detail speaks easily in the hall. Lehninger did subtle and interesting things in a richly moving reading.
The festival’s third orchestral program on July 12 further demonstrated Lehninger’s flair for programming. An all-Brazilian first half prefaced the main event, pianist Natasha Paremski in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Mozart Camargo Guarnieri’s Three Brazilian Dances proved a trio of beguiling charmers, deftly orchestrated and delivered with style and enthusiasm. Written in the 1930s, Heitor Villa-Lobos’ machine-age modern Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 was another matter entirely, a quirky proposition with a somewhat deceptive sequence of neoclassical-sounding segments: Preludio, Aria, Dança, and Tocata. Villa-Lobos’ ensemble adds saxophone and lots of percussion to produce an extravagantly original sound; as both a festival novelty and an evocation of Lehninger’s homeland, this was a fascinating addition to the docket.
In a short, mid-concert platform chat, Lehninger suggested we fasten our seat belts for Paremski’s performance of the concerto. He got it right. She offered a thrilling, if occasionally perplexing, reading of Rachmaninoff’s Third. Her technique is brilliant, her sound thundering, but there’s also a deep feeling for Rachmaninoff’s dark poetry and some marvelously introspective moments. There was more than a whiff of exhibitionism in Paremski’s outrageous tempos, but Lehninger kept up with her in a blistering, memorable performance.
The festival concludes July 21 with a Lehninger blowout — music of Falla, Rodrigo, Ginastera, Piazzolla, and Gabriela Lena Frank, with cameos for this season’s conducting fellows Valery Saul and Ryan Dakota Farris. For tickets and information, go here.
