In the summertime, Alexander Mickelthwate’s podium at the Bear Valley Music Festival is positioned inside a voluminous white tent just east of the Bear Valley Lodge, renowned for hosting skiers in the wintertime.
Ever mindful of showcasing his programming and performers, the German-born conductor is also conscious of what nature offers right outside the tent. “It’s next to a massive rock formation, so you feel the power,” he enthused in a Zoom interview from his posting as music director of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. “And there are trees outside, so when the sun comes through, it creates shadow play, and that becomes part of the performance. You see God smile, and it connects deeply with your soul.”
Joining in the Zoom session, Executive Director Priscilla Call Essert was quick to cite Mickelthwate himself as one of the festival’s attractions, contributing to audiences from California and beyond ascending in ever-greater numbers to Bear Valley. “He’s probably too modest to say it, but they can’t wait to get back and see Alexander and hear what he has to say,” Essert testified. “They love his storytelling and how he brings the music to life before anything is played and even while it’s playing. They love his energy and how accessible he makes things.”
Mickelthwate has made a mission out of matching place to program “and making it creative and fun,” as he put it. During his dozen years with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, he factored Manitoba’s high concentration of Icelandic immigrants into his programming, “creating a full festival of contemporary Nordic composers and artists.” In Oklahoma City, his concerts have commemorated the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, celebrated the opening of the First Americans Museum with compositions by Native composers, and last year honored what would have been the 100th birthday of local civil rights activist Clara Luper with a commissioned piece.
This year’s Bear Valley Music Festival launched on July 19 with a series of rock tribute bands — for “when you just want to dance and it makes you happy,” as Mickelthwate put it. Later, he’s theming one evening as “Our Earth, Our Stars, and Beyond,” in resonance with the festival’s breathtaking setting and transcendent nighttime star-scapes. This orchestral program on July 27 will start with a piece by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha’ Tate, with narration by Susan Randolph, a member of the Yaqui Tribe who’s currently living in Sacramento. “There are three tribes near Bear Valley, and I’m trying to connect with them,” Mickelthwate noted.
The eclectic evening will continue with Eric Whitacre’s Deep Field, inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope, followed by an orchestral adaptation of Jimmy Page’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, the latter with the Sonora Community Choir.
Over the course of two and a half weeks, the festival will also feature a Scottish-themed evening (with bagpipes and music by Felix Mendelssohn), a concert illuminated by 300 electric candles, the intimate jazz of Tuck & Patti, and a potpourri dubbed “From Oklahoma to California,” that last program featuring Michael Daugherty’s Route 66, John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur, Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, Philip Glass’s Suite from The Hours, and Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6.
The 54-year-old Mickelthwate noted that “every German boy grew up with the novels of the famous [late 19th-century] German author Karl May, romanticizing the American Old West, so I feel quite at home here. And I’m from Frankfurt, which is six hours to the Alps by train, so my friends and I went hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. Then, for 20 years with my family, we went every year to Lake Tahoe. It was extremely beautiful, and the quiet was intoxicating.” Mickelthwate’s 16-year-old son joined him for hiking and biking in Bear Valley a couple of years ago after the festival brought him on board to succeed conductor Michael Morgan.
“When I heard Michael had [died in August 2021], it was a shock,” said Mickelthwate. “I’d seen him just two years before [while I was visiting] the Bay Area. As a student, I’d gone to Tanglewood, and it was there that I’d met Michael as my teacher. Over a 30-year time frame, every conducting student got to know Michael because he was very heavily involved with the next generation. As a young conductor, I didn’t feel intimidated to talk to him; he was open, and he shared generously. And we’d stayed in touch over the years.”
After learning about the Bear Valley opening, Mickelthwate immediately applied. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, Bear Valley would be amazing, I want to program there. I want to make it individual,’” he recalled. “And I got the gig and felt really, really excited.” For his first season here, he programmed a concert tribute to Morgan and spoke lovingly from the stage about his departed mentor and friend.
“Usually with the big orchestras, you don’t talk,” Mickelthwate said. “It’s always looked down upon. It’s just a given that the audience will ‘understand’ the music. But for me, man, I have to experience it myself as a conductor and share it with the audience. If you think it’s ‘absolute music,’ it’s not. It’s all deeply personal.”
Mickelthwate’s approach is part of what has attracted not only audiences but musicians to Bear Valley. While concertgoers stay at the lodge, in nearby towns, or at campgrounds in cabins, tents, or RVs, the visiting performers are hosted by local families. With a 64-piece orchestra, “we’re big enough now to do [Dmitri] Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5,” said Mickelthwate, previewing a program that will also include Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with soloist Bella Hristova.
Members of the orchestra are drawn from the Sacramento Philharmonic, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and the so-called Freeway Philharmonic, “all these little orchestras in Modesto, Santa Cruz, and whatever,” Mickelthwate explained. “But what’s fun is we also have a handful from Arizona Opera, the Austin Symphony, and one or two from New York City who just enjoy being part of our family.”
The festival’s recent evolution has included active outreach to musicians and composers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and San Francisco’s Community Music Center, as well as to ensembles from the Stanford Jazz Workshop. In March of this year, Mickelthwate flew out to address high schoolers in the foothill town of Murphys for the first time. Volunteers and loaned instruments for the festival are drawn from high schools in Angels Camp and Sacramento, and Mickelthwate is hosting an intern from the Music Industry Studies program at Stockton’s University of the Pacific. The maestro hopes to inspire networking among other summer festivals so that “an artist might come to us and then go somewhere else, like Cabrillo.”
For complete program information (performances run through Aug. 4), visit the Bear Valley Music Festival’s website.
