Breckenridge finds a way to keep classical music alive

Monday, August 10, 2009

By David Sckolnik

BRECKENRIDGE — Is it possible? Solutions to issues that threaten classical music's future can be found at 10,000 feet and in a little more than two-hour drive from Colorado Springs. Two fine orchestras with bold artistic leadership are showing the way.

The setting is Breckenridge in the summertime. The good news begins on the journey there: an off-the beaten path route via Highway 24 and Colorado 9 that rewards with light traffic and beautiful scenery. Yet another prominent skiing destination that retools its persona and offerings to prosper in the off-season, the town was teeming with tourists last weekend. They come for perfect weather (usually 10-15 degrees cooler than the Springs), a remarkable alpine-spiced asphalt bike path running along the Blue River, high-country hiking, and, of course, the shopping.

In the heart of town there's also the Riverwalk Center, where this summer there will be 26 orchestral concerts, four chamber music concerts, and six folk/rock concerts. Once only tent-covered, a permanent structure opened two years ago and now easily defeats the unpredictable mountain weather. This is where the National Repertory Orchestra and the Breckenridge Music Festival hold court.

Based upon totally different artistic models, the two organizations have music directors with almost identical credentials: each has long-standing relationships with two orchestras during the regular artistic year, each heads prestigious orchestral programs on the college level and both have been leading their summertime festivals for an unusually long tenure.

Carl Topilow has been at the helm of the NRO for 32 years and has shepherded the 50-year-old organization through a name change and three different homes. Eighty-seven young musicians, who hope to compete for coveted full-time orchestra jobs, cram the equivalent of an entire professional symphony season into eight weeks here in the Rockies.

"This is Shangri-la, Utopia Unlimited," said Topilow, a native of the Bronx. "This is your life. No one has families or mortgages and they can just enjoy. But the program here gets them ready for the real world."
Indeed, with American orchestras cutting back programs and rosters and facing fiscal crisis on a regular basis, these are brutal times for aspiring musicians.

"I have a lot of empathy for these kids," said Topilow. "There's a real unkindness out there. But it's always been that way in the orchestral world."
The NRO strives to arm their "students" with more than just a competitive advantage for future auditions. They receive workshops in music theory and work with children. As a huge proponent of audience education and engagement, Topilow himself may be the most influential model they experience.

"We've got to connect," he said. "I always address the audience and try to guide them. I'm a very big believer in that."

For their season finale, the NRO brought back an alumna from 1985, Emanuelle Boisvert, currently concertmaster with the Detroit Symphony, for Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Eschewing the pyrotechnics usually associated with this work, Boisvert offered flawless tone and technique while emphasizing the warmth and peacefulness of the Concerto. Topilow and his Orchestra wholly embraced this patient approach and the performance slowly won the heart's of the audience.

It was left to the final work of this final concert to prove just how successful the summer has been for the NRO. They gave a stunning reading of perhaps the greatest of all orchestral works, Debussy's La Mer. Detail, rhythmic nuance and color were impeccable. The sad fact – Topilow's now great band has broken up and will never again make music together. Next year, the process begins all over again.

The Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra is an entirely different beast. In what was once a homegrown ensemble founded 29 years ago, there is now not a single Coloradan in its roster. All players are fully-professional and gainfully employed and take on a daunting challenge: match the sound of modern symphonic ensemble with a string section comprised of only 24 players (by comparison, the NRO uses 52!). While this concept may raise the ire of the musicians' union, it could become the only option for many struggling orchestras.

"We hire them because they play in tune and a have big sound," said Gerhardt Zimmermann, the Orchestra's Music Director of 16 years, who despite the obvious inference, is a native of Ohio. "I'm also a demanding maestro. If I think they can play better, I will say so."

But Zimmermann's sense of concert programming bodes well for the new Vanguard Series being debuted by the Colorado Springs Philharmonic this fall. "The St. Louis Symphony (for whom he was an Assistant Conductor) began a significant artistic and audience decline after Leonard Slatkin left. The new Music Director (Hans Vonk) became very conservative. Audiences may not have liked everything they heard in Slatkin's day, but they always talked about it and came to the hall in record numbers. If you want to preserve the music of the past, you must champion the music of the future."

Much like Topilow, Zimmerman regularly engages the audience. He may not be quite the musical educator as his NRO counterpart, but you do get the sense that you're sitting comfortably in the maestro's living room while carrying on light conversation. The opening work Saturday night was the "Happy Birthday Variations for Strings" by Peter Heidrich (this weekend was the official celebration of Breckenridge's 150th birthday). The program listed 14 variations parroting different composers and musical styles and Zimmermann made the most of this innocuous work by creating a contest by asking us to submit a list of the variations he left out. We paid attention.

Next, 14-year-old Joseph Eisele of Denver wowed the audience with his mammoth technique and spontaneous music-making in the two movements from the Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto. The now full orchestra offered stalwart support. All pointed to a performance of the Brahms' German Requiem (sung in English)

An orchestra gets only second billing in this great choral work, but Zimmermann's forces played beautifully capturing the heart and soul and the guts and glory of the orchestral score. The combined choral forces of the Summit Choral Society, the Larimer Chorale and the Cherry Creek Chorale fared well in the Requiem's more boisterous moments, but lacked the vocalism to express the more delicate moments contained in the composer's sublime writing. The soloists were also not ideal- Baritone Daniel Boyle had the right dramatic approach but suffered from inconsistent vocal sound, and soprano Jacqueline Culpepper sang well, but her approach was too hard-edged to match Brahms' vision.

Like all of America, Breckenridge is finding it harder to keep up their level of support for artistic and non-profit organizations. It will be interesting to watch how a community with limited resources manages to keep paying for two organizations that offer much of the same product to the public. Their solution will speak to many other communities.