Column 1, June 5, 2025 by Jim Berkenstock
This Thursday, June 12th, marks a very special time for Midsummer’s Music. We will celebrate the beginning of our 35th season and the wonderful history that has led up to that. In other words, it will be a celebration of what has gone before and an anticipation of what is to come.
Having been involved in that pregnant first concert at the home of Dianne and Peter Trenchard, June 14, 1991, both as a performer and as artistic director, I now often get asked the question, “Did you have any idea then that Midsummer’s Music would become what it is now?”
The short answer is no! I didn’t even know if we could manage a second season. We were only doing five concerts in less than a week, and we were very much a word-of-mouth, low-budget thing. We had a few people who were very helpful and supportive: Dianne and Peter, Alicia and Hugh Mulliken, Penny Schultz, Charlotte and Bob Yeomans, Bob Hastings, and of course, my wife, Jean. Somehow, we were successful enough to suggest we continue on the next season.
While I didn’t know how this would develop, I did know (or think I knew) a few things. I thought there was a way to make chamber music palatable to a larger part of the musical public. We had been told that previous attempts at chamber music in Northern Door had not been well met. There seemed to be a sense that chamber music was elitist—bluntly speaking, that it was for snobs. That seemed understandable yet quite odd. It seemed understandable because, so often, it was practiced around the country in large halls on a high stage with a string quartet playing Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms. At least, this was the general impression of the musical public.
There were numerous very excellent professional quartets satisfying a very limited public: the Cleveland Quartet, the Julliard, the Emerson, the Tokyo, our own Pro Arte, etc. In most cases, they played in 1,200 – 2,500-seat halls. The musicians came in the stage door; the audience the front door. They left the same way. The four performers were high up on a stage large enough to seat 90 musicians. It was all terribly impersonal.
There were just four of them playing similar instruments with a homogenous sound. But they were ostensibly playing for an audience that had a much more common musical diet provided by symphony orchestras. People were used to something called orchestration. This is the act of combining different instruments in a variety of ways to produce a panoply of effects or tone colors. The more instruments (and families of instruments) you have, the greater the potential variety. A symphony orchestra has a very impressive palate. The quartet is conversely seriously limited in that respect. In some symphonic compositions, tone coloration is fairly modest. In others, it is the main thing (think Ravel’s Bolero). Colorful orchestration can also partly cover up a dearth of musical inspiration.
In writing a quartet, however, the composer cannot resort to any kind of orchestrational camouflage. In fact, many composers have been drawn to the quartet (and other forms of chamber music) for this very reason. It is a kind of musical laboratory that isolates the purely musical. It is like going out in public nude. No help from a fashionable wardrobe! For a composer, to say the least, it concentrates the mind.
Yet, at the same time, the idea of chamber music as elitist struck me as very odd. Just the word “chamber” is a clue. Chamber, aka a room. Music for a room, presumably in a home? It’s the same in other languages: Salon music in French, Kammer music in German, Camera in Italian. In German it has also been called Tafelmusik (music to be played around a table) as a kind of home entertainment. Sounds pretty elitist, doesn’t it?
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it expanded exponentially concomitantly with a growing middle class that had some free time and disposable income. Composers wrote, and publishers published, for those folks who spent some of their new-found free time playing chamber music in family situations or among friends. Very elitist indeed. And let’s not forget the food and beverages that would have been an integral part of these get-togethers—countless sausages and beer, and wine and cheese and fruit, not to mention tortes and kuchen. Schubert hosted something called Schubertiaden; musical soirees where friends played some of his latest compositions and those of fellow composers with other friends and family packed into modest sized rooms.
All this got me thinking back in 1991. What if we could recreate that sense of intimacy that brought us chamber music in the first place? What if we played in smaller spaces with no stage? What if we all came in the same doors and mingled, musicians and audience, with refreshments afterwards? What if we expanded the pallet of musical colors by utilizing other instruments in different combinations—some call it “mixed” chamber music? And, in so doing, what if we varied the instrumentation somewhat from one work to the next to allow for textural variety? What if we expanded the repertoire from the canon of famous string quartets to include relatively unknown or recently re-discovered composers along with their more famous counterparts? And finally, what if we included, in addition to printed program notes, a bit of verbal commentary by one of the performers sharing their particular insights on a work?
Presenting this recipe at Midsummer (the longest day of the year) added a final dimension. In Scandinavia, Midsommar, is celebrated with great enthusiasm. The sun sets very late, and the parties go on into the wee hours (and for days). And Midsummer is not just a party, it is a feeling. In Germany, they call it Gemütlichkeit. Although difficult to translate, it can be described as a feeling of warm togetherness, friendliness, coziness, and good cheer. For us, this is a good way to describe a Midsummer’s Music event, and it doesn’t just occur in late June, it is a characteristic of our events throughout the year. As we say, “Midsummer is not just a time of year, it’s a way of being.” Well, throughout the years, this recipe has been quite successful. The welcoming atmosphere of a Midsummer’s concert and the superb level of performance is a very compelling argument for such an approach. This special time starts Thursday evening, June 12th, at the Kress Pavilion in Egg Harbor at 7:00 pm. Norman Gilliland from Wisconsin Public Radio will be our guest host in a gala program entitled “The Romantic Era of the Schumanns” featuring the glorious Piano Quintet by husband Robert Schumann, and an opening heartfelt Romance by his beloved wife, Clara. The program features David Perry, violin, and Jeannie Yu, piano, with additional strings. Kris Sabo will provide the bass in Friedrich Kalkbrenner’s Sextet for Piano and Strings, a virtuoso piano concerto-like work, from the same period as the Schumanns, that has a rather orchestral quality. A hearty reception will occur afterward in which the Gemütlichkeit will continue in full measure. Come join us or catch the same program on Saturday, June 14th, 7:00 pm. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sister Bay or Sunday afternoon at 4:00 in Sturgeon Bay at MUSE. For tickets or further information please call 920-854-7088 or visit www.midsummersmusic.com and get ready for some Romance and Gemütlichkeit!
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