Beautiful music in magnificent buildings

Last week we were at the Buzzards Bay Musicfest, a compact summer event with five concerts held over four evenings and an afternoon, all presented in the spacious comfortable auditorium at Tabor Academy. This week we attended an event very nearby but at the opposite end stylistically: the Newport Music Festival. This was the festival’s 48th season, and it presented 61 concerts over 17 days. The venues included the renowned mansions of Bellevue Avenue, churches and museums. The venues are both a strength and a limitation. Who could not enjoy listening to gorgeous music in the main hall of The Breakers? At the same time, use of these facilities meant you were sitting in folding chairs most of the time, making backaches a hazard. It also meant that the repertoire was almost exclusively chamber music, as none of the venues had the space for a full orchestra as well as an audience. The music presented was almost exclusively from the giants of 18th 19th and early 20th century composition: Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Mozart dominated. There was very little from contemporary composers or early music. One interesting novelty was an evening featuring a Chinese master of the pipa both as soloist and filling in the violin part of a quartet. Another inventive presentation was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #3 with a second piano playing the orchestral part. The music was uniformly high quality, and the event well-worth putting on your calendar for next year.