Music : A Long Way from Leipzig - Carmel Bach Festival

National Review, August 30, 1999 by Jay Nordlinger

Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif.

The world is dotted with summer music festivals, but could any be more enticingly named than the Carmel Bach Festival? I mean, really: the holiest music there is, performed and venerated in what may be the most beautiful setting there is. It seems too good to be true. But it is true. And not bad.

Carmel may be thought of as the capital of the Monterey Peninsula. Its Bach festival, a proud tradition, has been going on since 1935, when an archetypal area couple (Sapphic) established it. The peninsula may at first seem an incongruous backdrop, however lovely, for the Cantor of Leipzig: the crashing Pacific, the Pebble Beach golf course, Clint Eastwood, and all that. But everything goes swimmingly. The symbol of the festival-ubiquitous, on every scrap of paper, and banners throughout town-is the standard portrait of Bach, but with the master decked out in sunglasses. A more appropriate symbol can hardly be imagined.

The festival-which is "mostly Bach," in the way that another, better- known festival in New York is "Mostly Mozart"-offers an extensive program, including orchestral concerts, oratorio and cantata performances, recitals, lectures, and master classes. People gather here from all over the world, and some make a summer habit of it. There is a relaxed, contented feeling over the whole affair. One man has been attending the festival just about his entire life, and he refers to it as his "summer camp." He couldn't bear his year without it. Many others speak of the festival as a kind of spiritual retreat.

The festival-goers are a motley crowd: There are the proudly rich, tooling around in their swank Porsches; there are elderly-not aging, but truly elderly -hippies, with pure white hair and psychedelic headbands; there are blue-robed nuns from the local mission; there are pilgrim-like music-worshipers, after their Baroque high; and, every great while, though he's mainly a jazz fan, there is the ex-mayor, Eastwood. Everyone is remarkably nice, simply glad to be here. The veteran volunteer ushers may lead you to the wrong seat, but they smile warmly while doing so.

Presiding over the festivities is the music director, Bruno Weil, a classic Kapellmeister from Bach's homeland. He boasts solid musical instincts, abundant energy, and a world-class combover; his gemutlich leadership infuses every major performance. The first concert I attend opens with a Bach chorale arranged for string orchestra by Max Reger. It sounds under-rehearsed, and the players' intonation is a mess. What follows, however-Bach's treatment of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater-is a complete success. It features first-rate singing by the soprano Kendra Colton and the mezzo-soprano Catherine Robbin. Colton's is not an ideal voice; it tends to turn strident and metallic in the upper register, and she could afford to let a little more bloom into it. But she is a correct, intelligent singer, which is worth gold. Robbin has an elegant, dusky sound-occasionally a bit hooded-and she, too, knows her way around Bach. Her singing is admirably unforced: She does no more than she can, and she does all that is required.

The second half of the concert presents a delicious, ebullient work: La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress), a one-act, two-singer opera by Pergolesi, semi-staged here. The baritone is Sanford Sylvan, an experienced and creditable singer who is not in top form during this stretch of the festival. He has a lovely, rounded sound, but he often deploys it imprecisely. His Pergolesi is somewhat diffuse when it should be sharply etched. The opera, incidentally, is performed here in English translation-which is great for the audience's comprehension, but not without cost: The composer's notes really demand the Italianate syllables for which they were written.

The serva padrona herself is the soprano Rosa Lamoreaux, a singer known for early and Baroque music who is currently making waves with a recording of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century abbess now in vogue. She is, I confess, a friend of mine (Rosa, not Hildegard)-but that makes it no less true that she is a musician of superb judgment, exquisite voice, and all-capable technique. Readers are invited to discover so for themselves.

Maestro Weil begins the following night with Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, and it is-ghastly. Coarse, ragged, offensive. The much-loved Air-known as the "Air on the G String"-is positively sickly. Moments later, however, it is a different orchestra, with Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (the "Classical"). Ensembleship has settled in. The performance is taut, even polished. Such are the vagaries of concert life.

We then have a Bach cantata, and the "Festival Chorale," especially, is arrestingly good. They are crisp, in balance, and obviously well trained by their director, Bruce Lamott. A crack chorus is, sad to say, an increasingly rare commodity. The group shines again the next afternoon in Bach's Christmas Oratorio, a sublime work, too seldom heard in its entirety. The Carmel forces deliver an honorable account of it. Standing out is the tenor Alan Bennett, a teacher at Indiana University, whose singing is amazingly creamy, smooth as silk.