Preview: ‘Sunriver Music Festival to have doubly classical year in Central Oregon’

Brett Mitchell will lead the Sunriver Music Festival’s 2024 season in Central Oregon from August 10 to 23. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni)

BEND, Ore. — The Bulletin (Bend) has published a preview of the Sunriver Music Festival’s 2024 season, Brett Mitchell’s third as Artistic Director & Conductor:

Earth. Fire. Water. Air. These are the four classical elements the ancient Greeks used to explain the nature of matter.

Sunriver Music Festival, Central Oregon’s soon-to-return summer classical music series, returns this week with four classical concerts. Maestro Brett Mitchell and the Sunriver Music Festival team struck thematic gold this year, tying each of the year’s four concerts to one of those classical elements. It starts with Sunday’s opening night concert at the Tower Theatre in Bend, works inspired by or pertaining to Earth on the opening night concert Sunday at the Tower Theatre in Bend, the first of a total of four festival concerts that will be held at the downtown Bend theater.

On Aug. 18, the Festival Orchestra will present the second of the elementally themed concerts, “Water,” also the fourth and final of the Tower concerts, before moving back to its longtime home, the Sunriver Resort Great Hall, for “Fire” (Aug. 21), featuring pianist Joyce Yang, followed by the annual solo concert on Aug. 22, on which renowned violinist and bluegrass fiddler Tessa Lark will perform. Lark returns the following evening for the final of this year’s concerts, “Air.”

Four score

Before they tackle the second elemental concert, however, Mitchell and the Festival Orchestra will present the ever-popular Pops Concert, “A Tribute to Broadway & Film Music,” on Tuesday at the Tower.

This year’s Pops Concert features a celebration of big anniversaries, which includes music from films such as 60-year-old “My Fair Lady” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and younger fare such as 30-year-old “Forrest Gump,” Mitchell said.

“You kind of see where I’m going with it. All of these pieces are on this Pops program not just because they’re fun pieces that I think work together, but it’s a really nice way to commemorate the passage of time,” Mitchell said. “All of the pieces premiered or were released in ‘4’ years — 1944, 1964, 2004, that kind of thing.”

A fire idea

The idea for the season to have the “Classical Elements” theme came from the festival’s board and Meagan Iverson, SRMF executive director, Mitchell said.

“There’s no reason that the public would know this, but we have our final concert of every season on whatever night that is, and then literally the very next morning, the board and I sit down for like an hour and a half and we just do a debrief,” Mitchell said. They discuss what worked, what they’d bring back and what could be improved upon. One of those things was to have a theme that runs like connective tissue throughout the festival.

From the brainstorm session, “I took it and ran with it. I thought, ‘We have four classical concerts, and there are four classical elements,’” Mitchell said, adding with a laugh, “Apparently, now there’s five, but we don’t talk about that, ‘cause that screws up my season.” (To save you a Google trip: It’s “aether,” aka “quintessence.”)

Evocative tunes

Finding compositions that fit each evening’s theme was not exactly a problem.

“The trouble was not finding pieces; the trouble was ‘Of all of these pieces, what are we going to do?’” Mitchell said.

“Because composers have been so drawn to creating what we would call programmatic pieces — pieces inspired by things outside the music itself. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is not a programmatic piece; it’s just a piece of music. But Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, which we’re doing on opening night this year, is program music,” he said. “It’s music that was specifically designed to evoke Beethoven’s love of nature, which seemed a great way to open the whole festival.”

That evening’s concert also features Charles Ives’ Variations on “America” and a celebration of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” featuring the talents of Orion Weiss, described as a “brilliant pianist” by The New York Times.

Mitchell points to how the second classical concert’s music evokes the evening’s “Water” theme. It starts with Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube,” followed by Debussy’s “The Sunken Cathedral,” “which every elementary pianist tries to play,” he said. They’re followed by George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music Suite” and Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony.

“We really leaned into all of those various composers, really trying to be evocative,” he said.

Other program notes

Mitchell and Iverson are enthused about having violinist Lark on hand this season. In addition to her solo program on Aug. 22, Lark will perform Michael Torke’s “Sky” concerto with the orchestra on Aug. 23’s “Air” concert.

“That was literally written for her and to feature her unique skill set, which is bluegrass and classical,” Iverson said. “She’s renowned in bluegrass circles worldwide, in addition to being an acclaimed classical violinist.”

“The particularly cool thing about this piece,” Mitchell said, “is it absolutely takes someone with classical chops to be able to play this piece, but it also takes somebody with a deep understanding of bluegrass music to be able to.”

The family-style matinee Discover the Symphony concert at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 15, is a one-hour, kid-friendly concert fit for anyone looking to dip a toe in classical waters. The afternoon will also feature an instrument petting zoo, affording a hands-on approach, prior to the concert.

“This is a perfect concert for folks that have never been to a classical music concert to go to first,” Mitchell said. “I would call it like a sample platter of everything else that’s on the rest of the season, but if you’re not down to sit through a whole Beethoven symphony, you can sit through a movement of a Beethoven symphony.”

Mitchell recently signed on for another four years as conductor of Sunriver Music Festival, which will take him through 2028. Oregon holds a special place in the hearts of Mitchell, who spent summers with his grandparents in Grants Pass as a boy, and his family, with whom he lives in Colorado.

“It’s funny, you know. It’s like the position is with the festival, but I feel so much a part of the community,” he said. “It speaks well of Sunriver, and just Central Oregon generally speaking, that we’ve all felt so welcome.”

To read the complete preview, please click here.