Sipping some of the world’s best wines, right where they’re cultivated and cultured, is also one of the best ways to take in some of the world’s best small ensemble music, of various vintages. Welcome to Napa Valley’s Music in the Vineyards festival.
“Chamber music wasn’t intended to be the spectator sport it’s turned into, in the 21st century,” insists violist Michael Adams, coartistic director of the festival, now in its 16th year. “Playing in a hall to 2,500 people? I think Mozart would be horrified to see that, and Haydn, too.”
These 18th-century masters had seen their chamber works showcased in small select gatherings of royalty and aristocracy. In the following century, classical music extended outside the courts and churches to the middle class, and composers such as Schubert and Brahms initiated the practice of summer retreats, to write and have their works performed at small countryside concerts by friends. When Adams and his violinist wife, Daria, and their children first began taking summertime breaks in the early 1990s from their Minnesota home base to visit his parents in Napa, they felt it was high time to initiate organized chamber music activity in this idyllic, timeless setting.
Photo by Chick Harrity
“We tried several wineries in the hope that we could get established at a home base,” recounts Michael Adams. Napa County, anxious to limit traffic and non-wine-producing activity, was opposed to allowing any single venue to host multiple events, “so we discovered that we’d have to move around, and that turned out to be a tremendous blessing. There’s a unique ambience to each space, and people love to come and see the different wineries and try different wines at each concert. So we’ve sort of made lemonade out of lemons, or wine out of grape juice.” This summer’s 14 events will circulate over three weeks between 11 different venues in the towns of Napa, St. Helena, Oakville, Rutherford, and Calistoga.
“We take great pains to find acoustically desirable places to play,” Adams points out. “We tend to avoid the outdoors, because of lack of resonance, but our only outdoor concert this year [at the Harvest Inn in St. Helena] is surrounded on three sides by buildings and a stone courtyard, so I think the acoustics will be good. The Cave Theater at Clos Pegase [Calistoga], for a cave, is remarkably clear, and some of the other places we play either have stone walls with lots of barrels around the edges that are great reflective surfaces, or lots of wood, like at Rubicon [Rutherford], where it’s such a rich, warm sound.”
The repertoire, brainstormed by both Adamses, also abounds in variety. “It’s a question of balance, and we always try to include a little bit of spice in every program, something that’s very original, or unknown. For example, [on August 13] we’re doing the Five Madrigals by Gesualdo, the Renaissance composer, arranged for string quartet [by Bruce Adolphe]. Gesualdo was an ahead-of-his-time composer who wrote in a very spicy, chromatic ways. We’re surrounding that with what I call ‘musical airbags’: a Haydn trio [the “London”] and the Schumann Piano Quartet. The ‘airbags’ are more to the comfort level of the audience, who is more familiar with them.
“I think it was Lorna McGhee, our flute player, who recommended the Duruflé Prélude, Récitatif, and Variations for flute, viola, and piano. It’s a beautiful piece by a 20th-century Frenchman which I’d never heard before, and it makes a beautiful addition to a program that includes Beethoven and Dohnányi. Another interesting thing we’re doing is a piece by Gordon Getty, Four Traditional Pieces for string quartet, that’s on a program that includes Mendelssohn and Elgar. We’ve made a habit of trying to do a composer who has some local roots, and we’ve never played [Getty’s] music before, but he’s come to some of our concerts, and I asked one of his assistants to forward a list of his repertoire. ... It was an arrangement for some piano pieces, and I think what he changed was the orchestration, spreading the voices around the different instruments. The writing is very tonal, Post-Romantic I’d call it, and very comfortable for an audience to relate to.”
Audience comfort is, of course, enhanced by wine-tasting during the intermissions, “which are notoriously long. And it changes the whole feel of the second half of the concert: people come back a bit looser, much more in a jovial mood. So sometimes we’ll do programs that are ‘upside-down’; we’ll do the more serious work in the first half and then get lighter in the second half.” (On Aug. 8, nonalcoholic beverages and cake will accompany a kid-friendly matinee.)
It’s also in the second half of the evening concerts that Adams, a former radio host and exhaustive researcher, will present program notes from the stage. “I make a big point of telling the backstory, especially if there’s gossip and dirt about a composer’s salacious love life, or something like that.” For the first time this summer, Adams will also give a couple of longer, more sober preconcert talks on Wednesday evenings, dealing on opening night (Aug. 4) with the “compositional process” behind Sibelius’ Intimate Voices quartet.
For Adams and his wife, who functions as the festival’s coartistic director, Music in the Vineyards provides “the perfect antidote for what we do during the rest of the year.” He plays with the Minnesota Orchestra, she with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. While in Napa, both of them perform with the Enso String Quartet, which received a Grammy nomination last year for a recording that included the quartet by Ginastera that opens the first week of this summer’s festival. The couple will also appear in the second and third weeks with the Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet, which is committed to a three-year repeating residency.
“The ensembles do a lot of mixing-and-matching with the other musicians” who come to Napa, Adams notes, and that will include the Trio Cavatina this summer. “They don’t get the chance to do that much at other festivals. It’s like cheating on your spouse, in a way, and they tell us they look forward to it all year.”
The annual anticipation is shared by both local music fans and a contingent of the Adamses’ colleagues, friends, and neighbors from Minnesota, who look on the festival as “Wine Camp.” “Last year was a particularly good year, given that it was a recession,” says Adams about ticket sales. The festival is within 10 percent of capacity, with nearly half the ticket-buyers opting for a discounted all-event pass, “but we’re hoping to build on that, and to tap into the Bay Area population at large.”