CALIFORNIA’S TRINITY ALPS CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL
Credit: ianscarfe.com
Trinity County occupies a northernmost stretch of California and includes quintessential rustic towns such as Hyampom, Coffee Creek (population 217 according to the 2010 Census) and Weaverville, established in 1850 during California’s Gold Rush. The historic area also hosts Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival (TACMF) a high quality event that would have celebrated its ten year anniversary – if not for Covid-19.
TACMF is the brainchild of Ian Scarfe, a California-based concert pianist and chamber musician of international renown who has been Director since 2011. He is a member of the Vinifera Trio and staff accompanist and coach at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His other faculty stints include the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival and Telluride Chamber Music Festival.
The festival’s concept is unique in offering concerts and outreach programs with schools that feature top-notch musicians drawn largely from the San Francisco Bay Area – which of course includes collaboration with Scarfe. Also of interest is a Composer in Residency program that has presented premieres of works including Max Stoffregen’s Telescope Ridge.
An integral part of TACMF’s aesthetic appeal is where performances are held, what repertoire is played and the amazing fact that all events are free, open and have a pay-what-you-can, donations and sponsors are greatly appreciated approach that keeps it thriving. Festival venues usually extend from Oregon to the San Francisco Bay Area and present mainstream and contemporary works by composers such as Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart Brahms, Britten, Shostakovich and Copland performed at atmospheric indoor and outdoor settings like Trinity Alps Performing Arts Center in Weaverville, Sprague Theater in Bandon, Oregon, Pilgrim Congregational Church in Redding, Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, Trailhead Pizza in Coffee Creek, China Creek Amphitheater and the Century Club of California in San Francisco.
Many arts organizations have gone virtual to promote remote learning through performances or master classes and TACMF has just completed its seventh Digital Concert Series using the Zoom format. These engaging concerts provide interviews hosted by Scarfe and online contributions from festival musicians streaming from locations in Europe, California and Colorado, among others. Please click link at the end of this article for more information.
This background sketch serves as prelude to Ian Scarfe’s thoughts about TACMF’s rise to success with Editor Leonne Lewis.
What was the motivation behind your founding Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival?
My first experiences in Trinity County revolved around visiting some friends who had moved there to start a homestead in the extremely remote and beautiful Hyampon Valley. They built an inspiring farm, growing most of their own vegetables and raising animals on a scenic property near the South Fork of the Trinity River. Visiting the area was almost like a vacation for me. I spent time working outdoors, tending gardens, harvesting and processing food and doing manual labor like digging ditches, building barns and felling trees – but there was always time to enjoy the setting. We cooked delicious meals from the garden, spent some time every day at the river and enjoyed hiking and fishing trips in the Trinity Alps Wilderness.
After a couple of years of this I finally had a conversation with my friend and homestead owner Ellen McGehee about the possibility of bringing musicians to participate in this experience, the farm work, hiking, swimming, enjoying great food and also make music together. Ellen was thrilled with the idea and as a violinist herself often mentioned that the thing she missed most about life in a rural paradise was not being able to play music with others on a regular basis.
Thus the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival was born. It started with fairly limited goals - to provide a retreat experience for small groups of classical musicians who could do music together, enjoy the spectacular setting, participate in a working homestead and take a break from busy city life. The nearest shops were hours away in Weaverville or Redding, the nearest cell service was a 45 minute drive and using a very slow internet connection to check email involved hiking uphill to a barn with poor satellite connectivity.
Things evolved and last year we had 24 professional musicians attend the summer festival residencies and we stayed on Ellen’s farm or with homestay hosts around the community. While on tour across the North State or San Francisco we stay with hosts, some of whom own summer cabins or bed & breakfasts. The festival is so lucky to have generous, wonderful sponsors and hosts.
Over the past ten years have your expectations with TACMF been met?
It did not take long for the festival to start growing. During our first summer residency in Hyampom Valley I decided to reach out to a few communities about performing. After all I was planning to spend weeks learning incredible chamber music by Beethoven, Dvorak, Mozart and others with a cast of half a dozen professional musicians. The response was incredible as unexpectedly large and enthusiastic audiences attended our concerts. Many folks in this area told us that opportunities to hear live music were very rare and that they had never seen classical musicians in this area before. We had people who were attending their very first concert of live chamber music so it always feels as if we are doing important outreach. We started and have a program to bring music to Trinity County schools and also visit dozens of schools in Shasta, Humboldt, Siskiyou counties as well as some in the San Francisco Bay Area where many of the festival’s musicians live during the year.
Each summer we host two to three weeks of residencies for musicians and each winter a smaller residency for four to six musicians. I want to be constantly creating new groups, introducing more musicians and showing audiences that our musical connections span the entire globe. We have performed hundreds of chamber music masterpieces from classical to 20th century modernism and new compositions with the ink still wet on the page. Our Composer in Residency program invites composers to be part of the action and we have commissioned new works for chamber ensemble and children’s concerts from Danny Clay, John Glover, Max Stoffregen, Stephen Kahn, among others.
Who chooses the repertoire for TACMF concerts?
One of my favorite parts of this wonderful job is creating the programming. I love considering the balance that goes into a successful concert. It is about balancing personalities of the musicians into different groups, finding works that contrast and complement each other, building different ensembles that highlight the roles of each instrument on stage – occasionally even a singer. Most of all it is about giving audiences something familiar and comforting, challenging and new. This doesn’t always mean that a modern composition should be sandwiched between standard repertoire. Remember that sometimes music by Mozart or Brahms can be new and challenging to an audience and sometimes modern works can be traditional, predictable and incredibly tuneful.
How is TACMF’s Digital Concert Series via Zoom going?
2020 was set to be a big summer for us. Our 10th season was going to feature two dozen artists from all over the world, residencies in Trinity County that had expanded programs like open rehearsals and master classes to further engage the community and tours around California that would take our programs from rural communities to concert halls in the San Francisco Bay Area. When the pandemic put all our travel plans and live concerts on hold we were quick to start online concerts. At first they were simply a way to reach out to our fans and audiences and keep a connection. I also felt very strongly that I had an opportunity to still offer some paying work to my colleagues. Not only had they lost the opportunity to be a part of the festival but they had lost a significant amount of their work for the foreseeable future.
There are lots of compromises that have to happen to produce a Zoom concert: the audio quality is generally not great and can be unpredictable, the gear and hardware required by musicians can be costly and the audience can experience challenges if they are not familiar with the programming. But overall, our experience doing Digital Concerts has been exceptionally positive. Attendance has been great with North State and San Francisco Bay Area fans tuning in alongside folks from around the world. For many of the musicians this was their first live performance in months and they were surprised at what an enriching experience it could be, even performing in front of a camera instead of a live audience.
Using Zoom allows us to have live interactive aspects to our concerts where musicians are interviewed before their performances and speak about the music and their lives during the pandemic and audiences enjoy a post-performance Q&A opportunity to chat directly with the musicians. These kinds of social elements are incredibly important for live concerts.
Is there a particular composer you feel a closer affinity towards?
My favorite composer seems to change month by month and even week by week. Most of my career over the past decade has been as a collaborator meaning that 90% of the repertoire I am working on at any given moment is chamber music or duo music. Aside from occasional solo recitals or concerto appearances, chamber music has been my life but the pandemic has changed all of that. I have been spending nearly all of my time lately on solo piano music again and absolutely love it. I have been on a serious Chopin binge for several weeks now and am happy to finally learn his Barcarolle, Op. 60.
My inclinations seem to always lead me back to the classical era of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. But I have done an enormous amount of work with composers of our time and new music. For several years I was in a contemporary music focused sextet called Nonsemble 6 and we specialized in fully-staged and costumed performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire – performed from memory. And in 2017 I gave a solo recital of selections from movements of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus which was one of the most challenging projects I have ever done.
What does the future hold for TACMF?
It is very hard to say what will be possible for us this summer, fall or even winter. In fact it is hard for anyone right now to consider what the world will be like in two months or even two weeks. My hope is that we can begin offering live concerts in outdoor settings again soon since we have done outdoor concerts at nearly all of our past summer sessions and have several possibilities we can explore there. We could also return to some of our favorite venues like the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka or Old City Hall in Redding to produce recorded concerts or live-stream events. This will depend on the safety concerns of both the communities and the musicians who would be involved. It is a very tricky thing to balance.