This season, the 30th for Music in the Vineyards (MITV), founders and Artistic Directors Michael Adams and Daria Tedeschi Adams have decided to bring back four of the nine pieces that the Napa Valley chamber festival has commissioned over the years.
These works — Miguel del Aguila’s Salon Buenos Aires, Maria Schneider’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade Songs, T.J. Cole’s Playtime, and Kevin Puts’s In at the Eye — are sure to be highlights of the 2024 season, which runs now through Aug. 25.
Daria calls it a luxury to get to present this music again. Michael adds that MITV often co-commissions pieces with other festivals so that everyone shares the cost as well as the responsibility of presenting the new works.
Programming the commissioned pieces again is something that makes the 30th season special. “One of the ways we’re celebrating is by bringing back some of the pieces that we’ve given birth to, that we’ve midwifed into existence,” Michael says. “For a music institution, that’s one of the most exciting parts, sort of guaranteeing the art form will survive. That’s one of the best things you can do.”
Also to mark the 30th anniversary, a gala, “Espléndido! – From Bach to Brazil,” will be held on Aug. 25, with Grammy Award-nominated composer, pianist, and vocalist Clarice Assad performing works by J.S. Bach, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Miguel del Aguila, and Astor Piazzolla, with a dinner to follow.
In the past 30 years, MITV has grown from three weeks to four, adding more programs and special events such as the Music Illuminated series of lecture-demonstrations. The level of the artists has grown as well, and the Adamses are proud of the variety of performers the festival offers.
“Somebody said to us in the very beginning, ‘Make sure you watch out who you invite because then you’re going to have to invite them every year,’” Daria says. “We looked at each other, and we said, ‘No, we won’t.’ We kind of made it a policy and told everyone that no one will be invited every year.”
This means that almost every week, there is a new face on the festival stage. “I feel like that’s part of our mission to our audiences,” Michael says. “We always get the best musicians we can from anywhere, not just the same old crew all the time.”
This year, Michael says he’s particularly excited to see (and hear) the four movies, two of them comedies, that are part of the Not-So-Silent-Cinema program on Aug. 10. “The scores are always just brilliant, written by a friend of ours, Stephen Prutsman,” Michael says. “It’s always a blast. The audience goes home so happy after those.”
Daria mentions two events, one of them “Slavic Masterworks,” a concert on Aug. 16 featuring Cole’s Playtime. “[The piece] is very different and playful and fun. I’m looking forward to that,” she says. “Then we have a program [on Aug. 23 that] we’re bookending with Haydn and Mozart, and in between, we have pieces by two Pulitzer Prize-winning composers who are still living, Kevin Puts and Aaron Jay Kernis. So it’s like the old greats and the new greats.”
This year, for the first time, the Adamses are living in Napa rather than coming out to spend a month here for the festival. Daria retired from her job as a violinist with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in June; Michael had already retired from his job as a violist with the Minnesota Orchestra several seasons earlier.
Asked what’s exciting about the move to California, the Adamses enthusiastically mention no longer having to deal with the ice and other features of the Minnesota winter. They also waxed poetic about the scenery in Napa and being able to look out the window at vineyards and redwoods. Coincidentally, audiences love that about MITV as well.
