click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Dario Acosta/EmberPhoto/Ariel Doneson
- Mary Bonhag
Mud season isn't beautiful, but it does signal the end of what tends to be a long Vermont winter. The sense of hope it brings is the inspiration for Scrag Mountain Music's upcoming concerts in Montpelier and Warren, titled "Winter Wind, Melting Ice: The Season of Transition."
"We leave behind the cold, drawing-in energy and start exposing ourselves to the air. It's what Vermonters go through every year," said Scrag cofounder Mary Bonhag, who curated the program. The Marshfield-based soprano will perform with two longtime collaborators, flutist Catherine Gregory and pianist David Kaplan. Among the works the latter two will play is a duet titled "Inside the Breath" by Evan Premo, Bonhag's husband, who cofounded Scrag and shares artistic director duties with her.
Bonhag's thoughtfully chosen program is quintessential Scrag: It promises to bring a combination of new music and canonical works to audiences in a warm and unstilted way. (Scrag made the cover of the January issue of EMAg, the magazine of Early Music America, for its policy of "Come as you are. Pay what you can.")
Bonhag, who trained with Grammy winner Dawn Upshaw and counts a residency at western Massachusetts' Tanglewood among her bona fides, will sing an early piece by modernist Elliott Carter, Warble for Lilac Time (1943). The 10-minute-long setting of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a "joyful" evocation of the melting March snows and yellow-green willow tree sprouts, Bonhag said. She last performed it as a master's student at New York's Bard College Conservatory of Music.
"It's been in my body for 15 years," she said. "I've been waiting to share this particular song with Vermonters because I think people really relate to it."
Kaplan will also accompany Bonhag on three selections from Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, or Winter Journey (1828). Written as the composer was dying of syphilis, the songs are about a man's heartbreak in winter; they're "deep, dark and gorgeous — but heavy," Bonhag said. She joins a recent spate of female singers performing the work, which was written for a tenor voice.
Kaplan's solo is Claude Debussy's prelude "Des pas sur la neige," or "Footprints in the Snow" — a logical choice for the theme. He and Gregory, his wife, will also perform David Lang's "Vent" (1990), a minimalist piece that is included on their first album, released last September.
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Dario Acosta/Ember Photo/Ariel Doneson
- Clockwise from above: Evan Premo, Catherine Gregory and David Kaplan
Kaplan lives in Los Angeles, serves as co-artistic director of Lyrica Chamber Music in New Jersey and has performed everywhere from New York City's Carnegie Hall to London's Barbican. "Vent," he said by phone, is "a foundational piece for that era of American minimalism. You can see that David is exploring how he can reduce music to its core or essence. He's also working at combining the sounds of the two instruments into one laser beam of sound."
Lang, who cofounded the experimental New York City organization Bang on a Can, was a central inspiration for Judd Greenstein, a next-generation new-music advocate and cofounder of New Amsterdam Records. Bonhag will perform Greenstein's "Hillula," a mid-2000s setting of the Zohar.
The soprano specializes in sacred music of all types, but for a final piece, she chose one of Johann Sebastian Bach's few secular cantatas, No. 209. The work features Gregory playing an obbligato flute line — one that equally balances the soprano voice — with Kaplan accompanying.
Premo's "Inside the Breath," which he wrote specifically for Kaplan and Gregory, premiered at Kaplan's Lyrica series in 2022. Inspired by a painting of the same title in oil and cold wax by Vermont painter Jan Sandman, the minimalist piece is "a direct musical transcription of my meditation practice," Premo said by phone. Among the techniques he uses are phrases with the duration of deep, meditative breaths. The work, he added, is "a lot of swirling energy and musically represented sacred geometry."
Premo, whose compositions include commissions for the Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra, a former ensemble of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and Vermont's own Capital City Concerts, is particularly interested in spirituality. Scrag's current season includes the double bassist's ongoing series of "Spiritual Soundings" — live, improvised, ambient music created through looping and meant to enable audience meditation or movement. "Inside the Breath," Premo said, is about the composer's own inwardly spiritual movement, "the inwardness that is necessary to move from winter to spring."
More than any particular piece, Kaplan is looking forward to "the way that we present [the program]," he said, "from the informal spirit of the concerts to the way of engaging with the audience. It's not that you, as a performer, are in a frame or on a pedestal; there's a fluidity between audiences and performers. Scrag does that better than most."