Dick Ainsworth
One of the festival’s venues is the Hillside Theater at Taliesin.
The Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society gets us in touch with our inner child with its summer season,“Toy Stories.” But despite the whimsical title, there’s some seriousness mixed into the chamber music group’s 27th summer festival.
Pianist Jeffrey Sykes and flutist Stephanie Jutt, the group’s artistic directors, have prepared an ambitious season spanning three weekends. Twenty-three musicians from here and around the country will present 12 concerts in the Overture Center’s Playhouse, Stoughton Opera House and Hillside Theater at Taliesin in Spring Green. Each weekend offers two different programs.
“Teddy Talks” and “American Girls” start the season on June 8-10 in Madison and Spring Green. “Teddy Talks” opens with Violin Sonata No. 27 by the eternally young Mozart. “American Girls” features some amazing music by female composers, including Sueños de Chambi: Snapshot for an Andean Album by Gabriela Lena Frank.
On June 15-17, “Play-Do(h)” features music in the malleable key of C, while “GI Joe” explores Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat.
“L’Histoire du soldat is a wonderful, and expensive and extravagant, piece involving seven instrumentalists, three narrators and a dancer,” says Sykes. “It’s about a soldier who makes a bargain with the devil, exchanging his violin for a book that infallibly predicts the economic future.”
On June 22-24, our feathered friends will be the focus in “Rubber Ducky, You’re the One,” which includes The Swan by Camille Saint-Saens. That same weekend’s “Transformers” includes Paul Wiancko’s American Haiku, a contemporary folk-inspired cello and viola piece that reflects on the composer’s Japanese-American heritage. It will star violist Jeremy Kienbaum and cellist Trace Johnson, both members of the Dynamite Factory, BDDS’s program for young artists who are just launching their careers. Kienbaum says Wiancko’s composition “explores the duality between the Japanese poetic haiku and what it means to make it American.”
With equal parts fun and serious content, this festival has something for everyone. “I think audiences more than ever crave real, authentic experiences,” says Sykes. “Live chamber music is as real as it gets.”
