A heat wave coincided with the final concerts of the 48th Sunriver Music Festival held in the Sunriver Great Hall, a large log-cabin venue redolent of pine resin. The hall's spiral staircase and wrap-around balcony create unusual vantage points and seating around and behind the orchestra. Initial seats above the horn section emphasized horns and woodwinds, which sometimes drowned strings. Monday's program, "The Leipzig Connection," opened with Schumann's Manfred Overture and included Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 with concertmaster Yi Zhao as soloist. Audience members included a descendant of Robert and Clara.
The Great Hall is essentially a huge log cabin, and it still smells deeply of pine resin, a scent that takes me back to many such buildings that I knew in this area growing up. Atop a spiral staircase that wraps around one immense log with the circumference of a dinner table, there is an immense wrap-around balcony with a short series of risers at the back, as well as seating all around and behind the orchestra along the railing.
Monday the 11 th was "The Leipzig Connection," and opened with Schumann's Manfred Overture; an interesting factoid was that Robert and Clara's great-great granddaughter was in the audience that night. There was plenty of sturm und drang during the Manfred, and I did my best to hear over the oft-featured horns and woodwinds. The strings were rich and woody, somehow appropriate to this venue as if in a strange "like to like" principle, but it was hard to get a sense of the whole orchestra.
The usher kindly allowed me to move to some empty seats at the back of the balcony for the remainder of the evening, and so I was able to hear Mendelssohn's iconic Violin concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 quite well. Yi Zhao, concertmaster, was the soloist, and her cantabile portions were fantastic, while the difficult multi-stop sec
#sunriver-music-festival #sunriver-great-hall #mendelssohn-violin-concerto #schumann-manfred-overture #acoustics
Collection
[
|
...
]