Georgetown, Texas is an unlikely place to create a major music festival but one determined man has set his mind on doing just that. The Georgetown Festival of the Arts, now in its fourth year, is the brainchild of Ellsworth Peterson, an organist and scholar who held the Chair in Fine Arts at Georgetown’s Southwestern University for more than thirty-seven years.

An Eclectic Mix of Music and Fine Arts
The heart of each festival is a focus on the life and work of one major composer. Handel, Haydn and Schubert have been highlighted in past years; this year, the featured composer was Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. During four event-filled days this June, many of Mendelssohn’s greatest works were performed.

A growing component of the festival is Art in the Park in which dozens of artists show off what they have done in painting, sculpture, pottery, jewelry and multi-media. The concerts and lectures are mainly directed at connoisseurs but the Art in the Park events reach out to the larger community.

Shanghai and Miró Quartets Dazzle with Mendelssohn Octet
For me the most memorable event of the festival this year was a chamber music concert featuring the Shanghai and Miró Quartets. In the first half the Shanghai played Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor Op. 13 with Beethovenian seriousness and wonderful refinement. The Miró followed up with a fiery performance of the String Quartet in F minor Op. 80. After intermission came the pièce de resistance, the glorious Octet.

These two groups are at the top of their profession. The Miró is in residence at UT in Austin and we are lucky enough to be able to hear them regularly. Led by the charismatic Daniel Ching they play with incredible intensity and passion coupled with the ultimate in precision. The Shanghai Quartet was founded in Shanghai twenty-five years ago and is now in residence at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Their style of playing is more reserved than the Miró’s but just as carefully prepared and with a particular emphasis on beauty of tone.

I was very curious to hear how these very different ensembles would work together in the Octet, one of the most miraculous creations of the young Mendelssohn. But it must be understood that Mendelssohn did not conceive the piece as pitting one quartet against the other. This is not a work for two quartets but for eight players. And each of those eight players must be a virtuoso of the highest order. I have no idea how the decision was made as to who would play which part or which violinist would lead the ensemble. Perhaps coins were tossed. In any case, the chosen leader on this night was Weigang Li, first violinist of the Shanghai Quartet. One can speculate that we might have had a more exciting performance had Daniel Ching been in the leader’s chair, but that would be to unfairly characterize Mr. Li’s very fine work. Make no mistake, this was a great performance by any standard and the audience of about 200 was privileged to hear it. I have heard a number of excellent performances of the Octet – a Dallas performance by the Guarneri and Orion Quartets comes to mind – but this one ranks with the best of them.

And how well did these eight gifted musicians work together? Like a dream. Each man – and one woman, violinist Sandy Yamamoto of the Miró Quartet – listened intently to his or her colleagues, carefully matching tone, note lengths, phrasing and dynamics. And as is nearly always the case when the Octet is performed by fine musicians, the joy of playing was evident from the first note to the last. This is a piece that once it starts seems to have an unstoppable momentum that carries everyone with it, performers and listeners alike.

This concert was convincing evidence if any were needed that Mendelssohn was a giant among composers and further vindication of Ellsworth Peterson’s commitment to the celebration of the fine arts in Georgetown.

Festival Closes with Rarely Performed oratorio St. Paul
I returned to Georgetown a few days later for the final event of the festival: a rare full-scale performance of Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul. This work dates from 1836 and clearly shows the influence of J.S. Bach in its use of chorales. This is not surprising since it was the young Mendelssohn who just four years before had arranged for the first performance in 100 years of Bach’s great St. Matthew Passion. This is not to say that the two works bear much resemblance to each other. In one hundred years musical styles had changed and religious works were no longer confined to church performance. While Bach lived his whole life as either a church musician or a court composer, Mendelssohn made his living as a traveling virtuoso and as a conductor of public concerts. St. Paul was given its first performance not in a church but in a concert hall at a choral festival in Düsseldorf.

In Georgetown, St. Paul was performed in the Klett Center for the Performing Arts attached to Georgetown High School. The conductor was Kenneth Sheppard, a professor at Southwestern University and a very experienced choral conductor. He led Chorus Austin, the San Gabriel Chorale and the Mendelssohn Festival Orchestra with consummate authority. He knew the piece backwards and forwards and invariably chose the right tempo. Among his soloists tenor Scot Cameron stood out for the purity of his sound. The other soloists were less impressive and the baritone who shall remain nameless had the misfortune to totally forget that he had a solo to sing towards the end.

It may seem odd to some listeners that the Jewish Mendelssohn should choose to celebrate one of the great figures of the early Christian church, but of course Mendelssohn and his family had long since converted to Christianity in the face of rampant anti-semitism, and changed their name to Bartholdy. Nor was Mendelssohn a Christian for convenience only; he was a true believer who passionately proclaimed his faith in works like St. Paul and in his later oratorio Elijah.

While St. Paul sets out to tell the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and other major events in his life, as drama it is disappointing. The role of Paul himself is not given to a particular singer and important events are reported on rather than depicted. For these reasons Mendelssohn’s oratorios can be both dramatically and musically uneventful, even boring. The melodic style can be too sweetly sentimental. A sympathetic listener, however, can still find much to admire in St. Paul. The flute filigree coupled with low clarinet in the chorus “O be gracious, yet immortals!” and the cello solo accompanying the tenor in “Be thou faithful unto death” are sublimely beautiful. St. Paul is uneven and somewhat dated but I welcomed the opportunity to hear it.

More Energy and Imagination Needed for Festival to Flourish
While some of the music-making was exciting and committed, other aspects of the festival could use some improvement. Before the performance of St. Paul, Dr. Peterson gave a “Pre-Concert Lecture” titled “Mendelssohn’s Paul: Sorting Out the Story.” Peterson droned on for about fifteen minutes and did little more than summarize what we could read for ourselves in the program book. When he had finished he took no questions and shuffled off. What this added to the performance of St. Paul or to the festival I can’t imagine. The talk was of no help to patrons hearing the work for the first time and too rudimentary to be of interest to scholars. And that was consistent with the general ambiance of the festival – it was not festive at all; with the small audiences I saw, it is not nearly as healthy as it needs to be to survive.

Someone needs to give this festival a transfusion of energy and imagination. For anyone setting out to create a music festival which will grow and flourish it is not enough to present good music, especially in a place as small and as culturally modest as Georgetown. The organizers must make an effort to spread the word that something wonderful is happening in town and that one simply must come and hear it. Then the event itself must be an event with festive trappings in the lobby and in the hall.

When my wife and I arrived at the Klett Center with Starbucks coffee in hand the first sound we heard was that of a custodian telling us in authoritarian tones that “No coffee is permitted on the premises.” In the lobby of a performing arts center? You’ve got to be kidding. But I don’t think any kidding is allowed in Georgetown either. No wonder there were only about 200 people in the hall for St. Paul.

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