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.

Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic accept applause from the sold-out crowd in the Norton Center for the Arts' Newlin Hall on March 5, 2009. Photos by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

There are two presumptions you could have made about Thursday night’s New York Philharmonic concert at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts in Danville.

This being a farewell tour for Maestro Lorin Maazel, 79-years-old today, you could assume this would be one of the last gasps of a tired old partnership, especially considering the Obamaesque press coming out of New York for Maazel’s successor, Alan Gilbert.

Lorin Maazel conducts in Danville.

Second, and somewhat contrary to the first presumption, Maazel being such a marquee name in classical music, you might assume he’d dominate the evening, and we’d be preoccupied watching the podium for the legendary maestro.

As often happens with presumptions, neither came true, this time in the best way possible.

The New York Philharmonic came to a sold-out Norton Center billed as one of the best orchestras in the United States, and it sounded like one of the best orchestras in the world. This was the orchestra of Mahler and Bernstein.

We often talk about the vast sonic difference between hearing music performed live and on recordings, and lord knows, we hear a lot of recordings and broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. Thursday night, as much any time I’ve experienced in Central Kentucky, you really heard that difference. When the orchestra needed to turn on a dime, it turned on a pinhead. Crescendos lifted the Norton Center’s Newlin Hall and pastoral passages were as sublime as the Boyle County countryside.

The orchestra impressed from the beginning, Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture springing off the stage, highlighted by Thomas Stacy’s English horn solo.

The Philharmonic played emotional pieces with the zeal they warrented, including Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor and Maurice Ravel’s arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. From the crystalline opening trumpets, Pictures was the evening’s starkest example of live vs. Memorex, and it came across as stunning as newly restored print of a Technicolor classic.

Looking over the roster, it is striking how many of the Philharmonic’s musicians are well-known names in their own rights: concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, cellist Carter Brey, clarinetists Stanley Drucker and Mark Nuccio, trumpeter Philip Smith, horn player Philip Myers and several others, all of whom were playing up to their reputations Thursday. Oboist Liang Wang seems to think he has the best job in the world, based on the zeal with which he played.

Notice, we’ve been talking about the orchestra.

Far from the podium showboat, Maazel was a modest presence who helped his orchestra shine. He had a subtle stick, seeming to elicit the sharpest passages with the most casual waves of his baton. At least on this night of a colorful program and two encores, Maazel looked like a hard act to follow.

A note, lest it seems like the big band has come to the provinces and easily impressed the country folk: The last time I saw the New York Philharmonic was at Lincoln Center in 2007, and it was far from impressive: some indifferent Beethoven followed by a hesitant concert version of an Alexander Zemlinsky opera under James Conlon’s baton. Maybe it was simply an off night, because this sounded like a much different group onstage in Danville.

Norton Center director George Foreman presents Lorin Maazel a certificate that makes him a Kentucky Colonel. Photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

Norton Center director George Foreman has made it an unofficial mission to bring the Top 5 orchestras in America to his stage. Bringing the New York Philharmonic to this town of just over 15,000 was quite an achievement.

Note: While in the Bluegrass State, Maazel was made a Kentucky Colonel. He didn’t don the white suit and string tie, but he did get a very nice piece of paper to take back to New York.