Copious Notes

Audiences packed the Meadow View Barn at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill for last years Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

• Check out our audio slide show from As It Is In Heaven.

Shaker Village of ­Pleasant Hill doesn’t necessarily need music.

The lush, green grounds of the community are a sustained pianissimo passage, frequently augmented by the songs of birds, whistling of the wind and rhythm of rippling water.

Leave your iPod behind.

But that does not mean that music cannot enhance the Pleasant Hill experience.

As Rachel in "As It Is in Heaven," Erica Solitaire Chappell sings in Pleasant Hill’s Meadow View Barn.

The Shakers, after all, are known for their songs - Simple Gifts, anyone? The University of Kentucky Theatre has been bringing some of those tunes to the stage of the Meadow View Barn the past two weekends with its ­production of Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven.

That production, which has its final performances today through Sunday afternoon, begins and ends with the women of the play ­strolling through the field adjacent to the barn raising songs to the tops of the trees.

The music does not stop there, though.

Next weekend brings the third annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, and if you are trying to come up with a more perfect ­marriage of music and venue in ­Kentucky, you have some work to do.

We tend to think of ­classical music as something to seal in a perfectly quiet concert hall, supposing that one obscured note would obliterate an entire work. Of course, perfect silence is rarely achievable in a hall full of people, with walls that aren’t impervious to honking horns and sirens.

Yes, Meadow View Barn is susceptible to the sounds of its environment, but a violin mixes so much better with a bird or a breeze than a candy wrapper or screeching tires.

At last year's Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, the lineup included the Orion String Quartet, featuring sibling violinists Todd and Daniel Phillips.

In the natural setting, at last year’s festival, the music seemed to open, with the instruments so close to their source materials.

And these are musicians to make the most of the environs.

All three years of the ­festival, the Norton Center for the Arts at Danville’s ­Centre College has engaged the Chamber Music ­Society of Lincoln Center to ­oversee its artistic direction. ­Pianist Wu Han has been the constant, and this year she brings ­violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Fred Sherry and ­clarinetist David Shifrin. If you pay attention to classical music, each is an ­internationally known practitioner of his or her instrument.

For the second year, the festival has engaged a second group, this time the Escher String Quartet, to play in its own right and mix with the Lincoln Center musicians in the festival’s four concerts.

Those combinations, like Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, scheduled for next Sunday night, are the real treats of the event.

The morning sessions, in the village’s ­Meetinghouse, focus on Ludwig van Beethoven on Saturday and J.S. Bach on Sunday. The evenings include music of Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

Debussy and nature? — makes sense.
As does trying to take the arts out to environments such as Pleasant Hill.

So often we try to hype the natural beauty of the ­Bluegrass, but then when it comes to presenting the beauty of the arts, we retreat to the city like everywhere else.

The Heaven performances, chamber music festival and other outdoor events show an arts community trying to get more in tune with our ­surroundings.

Writing a St. John Passion, James MacMillan is opening himself up to comparison with no less a liturgical composer than J.S. Bach. It is Bach’s Passions, St. John and St. Matthew, that have been benchmark interpretations of the death of Jesus Christ in classical music, along with Theodore DuBois’ The Seven Last Words of Christ and the Easter portion of Handel’s Messiah.

Only time will tell if MacMillian’s work does indeed hold up next to the bona fide classics it succeeds. But in terms of putting a modern classical interpretation on the passion story, the Scottish composer succeeds brilliantly.

The work has received its world-premier recording by the London Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned the piece last Spring to celebrate the 80th Birthday of Sir Colin Davis, one of the best interpreters of sacred choral pieces in the business. So, there were grand ambitions for this work for symphony orchestra, chorus and baritone.

Baritone Christopher Maltman helps set the tone for the Passion singing in a way that is at once lyrical and shaken. While many of the traditional classical passion pieces are so sublime you can forget the subject they address, the narrative of blood and violence is right there in MacMillan’s music, particularly the winds, thrashing about from the beginning. This is tough music, and not easy to listen to.

But if it puts you off, give it a second listen. Under Davis’ wise and impressively vigorous direction, the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus deliver a masterpiece of a narrative performance.

These days, many people look at classical music with a been-there, done-that derrison. How can a contemporary composer hope to compete with the masters, and what is left to be said? With the age-old text of St. John, MacMillian demonstrates the contemporary vibrance of these tools to make powerful statements for the 21st Century.

After listening to Natalie Dessay’s new recording of three sacred cantatas by J.S. Bach, it’s funny to be reminded these pieces would not have been sung by a woman when they were composed.

People had some weird ideas back in the 18th Century.

Fortunately, the tradition of excluding female sopranos from the church in favor of boys has passed, and we have the option of hearing Dessay’s gorgeous, sensual interpretations of these works with conductor Emmanuelle Haïm and her baroque ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée. This is the latest teaming of Dessay and Haïm, who had previously collaborated on works by Bach, George Frideric Handel and others. It is a beautiful relationship.

The ensemble is indeed a period instrument group. But that’s never at the forefront of your mind, listening. This is not a museum trip. It’s Dessay bringing her bel canto sensibility to to three of Bach’s timeless pieces: Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (Praise God in all Lands), Ich habe genug (I Have Enough) and Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (My Heart Swims in Blood). Reading the titles is a reminder of what a heavy feel the German language has. But in Dessay’s voice, the words float, even take gentle flight in Ich habe genug, where the soprano flutters alongside a delightful flute. There’s even more pause is the reminder that this piece was originally composed for a bass soloist, before Bach wrote the soprano version.

Maybe it’s not all historically accurate, but it sure sounds right.