Chezley Royster
Tenor Daniel O’Dea (left) and soprano Margaret Lattimore delivered at the festival’s opening concert.
John and Rose Mary Harbison — founders and stars of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival — recently spearheaded a monumental effort to rescue and restore a trout stream that once ran through their property on State Highway 19 outside DeForest. This year’s festival, “Water Music,” celebrates the completion of the project.
The opening concert on Aug. 27 was a particularly rewarding start to one of the summer’s best chamber music festivals. Schubert’s music dominated the program’s first half. His late-career song, Auf der Stromm (“On the River”) for tenor, horn and piano, received a powerful performance by local tenor Daniel O’Dea, with the ubiquitous Linda Kimball on horn and the brilliant young pianist Molly Morkoski. Morkoski then joined mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore in six songs by Schubert that evoked water. Lattimore’s voice is a strong and beautiful one. Her clear German diction was particularly striking.
Later, Lattimore and Morkoski performed a set of four songs in Italian, from the large cycle of John Harbison’s settings of the poetry of Eugenio Montale. These were given appropriate urgency by these two seasoned performers.
Important music by Bach closed each half of the program. The Violin Concerto in E (BWV1042) was played by Rose Mary Harbison, joined by an ensemble of five string players, one per part, serving as the orchestra, with John Harbison rendering the continuo part on a piano — in the absence of a harpsichord.
Harbison again fulfilled that function in the work that closed the program. Back in his Boston home base, he has become an active advocate for Bach’s cantatas, and he included one this time. O helices Geist- und Wasserbad (“Oh Bath of Holy Spirit and Water”) is a celebration of baptismal water’s redeeming powers. It calls for four singers, with instrumental ensemble. Soprano Kristina Bachrach and bass Nathan Krueger, combined with Lattimore and O’Dea, rendered the textual values with particular strength.
Midway between, John Harbison played three contrapuncti from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue.
“Water Colors,” the third program of the festival, featuring two Schubert masterworks, will be performed Sept. 2 and 4. Tours of the restored trout stream precede performances in the barn. For more information see tokencreekfestival.org.
