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Music

Sunrise at Purgatory

Music in the Mountains celebrates contemporary music

Sweet irony: As the sun set slowly behind the mountain Sunday night, inside the Festival Tent a musical dawn broke.

Flutist Carol Wincenc (pronounced WIN-sense) floated on stage in pink silk. Smiling, she told the audience about the flute concerto she was about to play: “Fury of Light,” by American composer Jake Heggie. Based on “Sunrise,” a poem by Mary Oliver, the work had been created to celebrate Wincenc’s 40th anniversary on stage.

“This is its Colorado debut,” she said.

A performer with an international reputation, she is a modern muse. Composers as different as Lukas Foss, Joan Tower and Christopher Rouse have created works for her. You can listen to many on YouTube as Wincenc has a following due in part to her numerous awards, recordings and quarter century as a professor at Juilliard.

Her appearance at Music in the Mountains is a minor miracle. Last week, she performed at Canada’s Banff Music Festival. On Saturday, she arrived in Durango. Sunday morning, she rehearsed with the Festival Orchestra, and at 6 p.m., she streamed on stage to perform a work inspired by a poem about daybreak and dedicated to her.

Fortunately, Wincenc read the poem, which includes the title line: “Fury of Light.” The line appears midway in the text and underscores the effervescence of the four-movement work. Composed in 2009-10, the work was originally scored for flute and piano, then small chamber ensemble and finally full orchestra.

Impressionistic in nature, the 16-minute concerto opened with a sustained note in the flute and an ethereal string passage underneath that soon broke into shards of brilliant sound. Thematic material followed with repeated declining half-steps and chromatic lines, again punctuated by shafts of color from the orchestra. Throughout, sudden pulses pierced the fabric from pizzicato in the harp to pings from the glockenspiel, even trumpets. Dawn breaking.

The second movement, “Elegy,” contrasted with long, sustained lines, evoking a sparse quality of innocence. “Meditation,” the flowing third movement, opened with an orchestral passage, interrupted by occasional percussive effects, including a shimmering gong – wisely, but sparsely used. A very fast final movement emerged full throttle, echoing earlier thematic material, but above all, earning the work’s title by ending in a sharp, sudden brilliance of sound.

How do you follow a high point like that?

Wincenc and Festival Orchestra principal flutist Jean Larson Garver dipped back into the 19th century for a jovial, dancelike romp by Franz Doppler.

“Get out your tambourine,” she said to the audience, noting her Slovakian-Hungarian heritage and preference for gypsy music.

The audience response again matched the music, so Wincenc and Garver played an encore. “The Swingin’ Blues” spun out in two minutes, accompanied by Stephen Hemphill’s light touch on the snare drum.

The concert had opened in darkness, with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, also known as “Fingal’s Cave.” Its seafaring swells and ominous theme set the stage dramatically for “Fury of Light.”

After intermission, the concert concluded with a big, confident reading of Antonin Dvorák’s “New World Symphony.” Conductor Guillermo Figueroa introduced the work with a little storytelling of his own. He emphasized the composer’s trip to America in the 1890s, the controversy over the so-called American melodies and Figueroa’s belief the work was a “Czech symphony through and through.”

Credit Figueroa and Artistic Director Greg Hustis for another evening of creative programming. And let’s thank the stars for aligning Banff with Durango, so Wincenc could arrive and magically recreate sunrise at sundown through music.

jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, artist and critic.

Review

“Adventurous Spirit,” 5:30 p.m., Sunday, Durango Mountain Resort. Conductor Guillermo Figueroa, Festival Orchestra, Music in the Mountains, with flute soloists Carol Wincenc and Jean Larson Garver.

Jul 21, 2014
Storytime on the mountain


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