Canandaigua Lake Music Festival

There is so much going on this summer that I completely forgot I had accepted my friend Mary Ann’s invitation to accompany her to a concert at the Canandaigua Lake Music Festival! Canandaigua seemed a long way to go for a concert, especially when there’s so much great music right here in our backyard, but it’s actually not that far, and the drive is pretty easy, even though we left at rush hour so we could grab a quick bite beforehand (I finally got to the Rheinblick German Restaurant, which had been on my ‘to do list’ since I moved here – the Schweinshaxe was good, but didn’t measure up to my memory of the crispy, fatty hock I had years ago at Kloster Andechs).

The program was “Chopin meets Hedgehog,” and I was particularly excited to attend in the company of Mary Ann, herself a musician and pianist.  We arrived just in time, and found seats in the front row, with a nice view of the piano keys. Howie Jacobson introduced the talented pianist, Audrey Andrist, reminding the audience that music brings people together – families, friends – independent of age (I felt like anecdotal evidence, on my ‘girls night out’), and urging us to continue to bring more people together in the future (the small auditorium of the Finger Lakes Community College wasn’t nearly half full). 

I didn’t recognize anything on the program, but Mary Ann did, and we both agreed Audrey played beautifully and gracefully. Her short educational introductions to each piece, including a few bars to illustrate a point, gave the audience mileposts to listen for, which made the music more enjoyable and relatable. She had been playing one of the Chopin pieces since she was 17 – she said she still uses the score with all of her teacher’s markings – and we could both hear and see her emotional connection to it. 

After the intermission, before Elisa and Amy Sue Barston joined Audrey on the stage, Kevin Kumar (co-artistic director) and Adam Silverman (composer, and husband of co-artistic director and cellist Amy Sue Barston – this was truly a family affair!) had a brief chat about the final ‘world premiere’ piece on the program: The Hedgehog’s Dilemma, for piano, violin, and cello. His advice to the audience was that to “just relax and enjoy is always an option” or we could pay attention to the “leadership of the performance” as it passes back and forth, to the overlapping of melodies, and to the relationship between the music and the title (he had wanted to write something evocative of the way that the closer two hedgehogs get to each other, the more difficult it gets because of their spines, and we would hear this in the “discomfort of the violin and cello being close together”). He also said that the piece would be “familiar ground to those who enjoy classical romantic music.” Mary Ann and I again agreed, this time that Silverman had achieved his objective – the music was indeed prickly, and more contemporary than he had admitted (there seemed to be a lot of dissonance for dissonance’s sake…).

On our drive home, Mary Ann and I plotted to get together for the upcoming “Eastman Presents” series, and I reflected that I am glad to have access to such a rich offering of performing arts here in the Rochester area, and to have made so many wonderful friends here to experience them with!