Birdfoot Music Festival brings youthful style, classical smarts and ...

I expect musical surprises when young virtuosos play repertoire dear to their hearts, and I got plenty from the Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival in New Orleans. This past week, I attended two of the Festival?s four inaugural concerts and I heard fiery, committed, intensely personal readings of music by Britten, Beethoven, and Schumann.

What I didn?t expect were the wine-fueled post concert conversations, the easy-going stage manner of the performers, or the snazzy red silk slacks that artistic director Jenna Sherry wore in lieu of priestly black. I was disarmed by players who could discuss and demonstrate the intricacies of a string quartet ? and do so without turning a concert into a grad school lecture. I got a peek at the future when violinist Khristopher Tong set a laptop, not a printed score, on his music stand.

As a concertgoer whose interests also take him to Frenchmen Street clubs and big outdoor festivals, I was delighted to see Birdfoot?s efforts to transform the dutiful, dull business of showcasing classical music. At venues ranging from the Old U.S. Mint to the New Orleans Jewish Community Center, the organizers made sure that audiences could get close to the music with in-the-round seating and by the simple expedient of setting up on the floor. One of the festival concerts was staged outdoors at the Piazza d?Italia.

For me, Birdfoot delivered what I want from any Louisiana festival: it was friendly and it was festive. It also brought out a special warmth in audiences. Concertgoers made my five-year-old feel right at home when he sprawled on the floor, a few feet from the band, during an open rehearsal.

None of that would have mattered, of course, if the music making had been routine.

At the shows I attended, the risk-taking energy was palpable in most performances. I certainly felt it in Britten?s edgy, doom-laden third string quartet which got a powerful run-though on Wednesday from violinists Tong and Sherry, cellist Joann Whang and violist Dash Nesbitt. At the JCC, the players built a powerful musical line from a composition full of ghostly harmonics, rich overtones, squeaks, death rattles, tapping and moans. Their account was both haunting and valedictory ? perfectly evoking the mood of a composer who knew that he was mortally ill when he wrote this masterwork.

At times, the ad hoc, collaborative spirit of the Festival performers wasn?t enough. During Saturday?s gala at Dixon Hall, I found myself nodding during Dvorak?s 1878 String Sextet in A major. This performance was professional and collegial ? too darned collegial ? and lacked the stamp of a single driving personality. The players kept trying: Jonathan Chu unleashed some deep dark buzzing from his viola and violinist Andrea Segar stepped up the tempos. But I didn?t hear the bounding folk-like energy, the dark drones and pulsing rhythms that I expect in a truly idiomatic account of the Czech master?s work.

If I expected more, it was because I got so much from the other offerings on Saturday.

In a Beethoven piano trio from 1808, Tong, Whang and pianist Prach Boondiskulchok, acted like gymnasts, pulling the musical fabric into a tightly sprung trampoline that sustained vaulting musical phrases. In the opening movement, the cello and violin traded lines like a couple of lovebirds. The pianist understood that a sudden silence could also be part of a dramatic musical story. Together they delivered unbuttoned playing ? and a couple of minor stumbles ? the kind of performance that feels very close to the improvising spirit of the composer himself.

Birdfoot closed on an equally transcendent note with pianist Danny Driver leading his colleagues through Schumann?s 1842 Piano Quartet in E-flat major. The British pianist showed why he left such a mark in New Orleans during his brief, post-Katrina residence in the city. He knows, for example, that there is no point in playing Schumann unless your hair is on fire, and he elicited that kind of playing from his colleagues: cellist Michael Untermann, violinist Clara Kim and violist Nesbitt. It wasn?t a matter of bullying by Driver: his sumptuous sound and feathery touch are just what every string player dreams about. But with each tempo shift and dynamic change, he put an elastic snap into the music, turning the manic succession of notes-on-the-page into a narrative of yearning emotion and ecstatic release.

I?m glad that Driver will come back next?March for a program with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. I hope that the Birdfoot Festival is back, too.

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Chris Waddington can be reached at cwaddington@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3448. Read more about at nola.com/music. Follow him at twitter.com/cwaddingtontp.

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