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    Belle, Sebastian and Me

    Following the world’s twee-est band down the Pacific Coast after a divorce and the death of a parent.May 31, 2022, Seattle, Paramount TheaterMy favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.I’m starting out in Seattle, where I live. My grown children come along and this feels just right, for the band’s presence in my life maps directly onto my motherhood. I discovered them when my first child was a baby. The voice of the lead singer, Stuart Murdoch, accompanied me over the next two decades, ringing out as I drove the school run in my VW van (little kids), then my Prius (medium-size kids), then a sensible Mazda (teenagers).Or should I say “lisping out.” If you know anything about Belle and Sebastian, you know they are twee and also, sometimes, the singer lisps. That’s what’ll be on their grave: TWEE LISPERS. As a person who grew up suckling at the bitter teat of punk rock, I didn’t see myself ending up here. But Belle and Sebastian has been the great musical love of my adulthood, and as the years slip by, it’s my belief that I am lucky to love anything at all. I don’t exactly understand why I love them, but I do.I’ve seen them so many times that I know exactly where to stand: at the rail, stage right, because that’s the direction Stuart faces when he plays piano.At the Paramount, the kids and I line up, stage right, and the band files out. There are so many of them: seven in the band, plus the few local musicians they add at each stop. They sound fantastic, but there are off-kilter notes: Sarah Martin, the violinist, is out with Covid. And they don’t do their traditional rave-up dance party to “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” when the audience jumps onstage with them. They’re all here, my secret friends, my superheroes, but I feel slightly cut off from the experience. My eyes dart around the crowded theater, looking for maskless folks who might be exposing me and my kids to the virus.I’m focused on my own fear, my own story. I am here, but not quite here.June 1, 2022, Portland, Roseland TheaterBarreling down I-5 the next morning, I have some time to reflect, not necessarily a welcome state of affairs. Reflection is a young woman’s game — it tends to go better when you don’t have quite so much to reflect about. And I have plenty: In the last two years, my very long marriage has ended (amicably, but still), I’ve sold the family home, I’ve nursed my beloved father to his death in the midst of a Covid-riddled hospital. These are the things I think about, or try not to think about, as I drive the familiar freeway.In Portland, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend — such a strange word for me, a person who was married for 20-plus years. He’s a music writer who has occasionally mocked me about my B & S love. He’s game to go to some shows, but I’m a little worried he might not get it, whatever it is. That indefinable thing that makes me love this band.Roseland is hot and crammed with all kinds of people — young queer couples, middle-aged former punks, families with little kids. My boyfriend angles us to a spot stage left, and I’m too embarrassed by my trainspotter-ish tendencies to insist that we move to the other side. I fall into conversation with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of middle-aged white men who show their band love by accruing details about set lists and venues.Sarah is back! The venue is tiny. Stuart is right there. I start to feel the miracle of seeing a band you love — they have flown out of your car speaker or your earbuds and are now made flesh before your eyes. Stuart sits on the edge of the stage and slings one leg over the other. He looks like a very relaxed, debonair lamb. He extemporizes verses to “Piazza, New York Catcher.” A bald man leans his bulk on me. Two wild-haired young people in front of us twine their arms around each other’s necks. We all hold our breath and can’t believe our luck.When we walk out into the hot night, my boyfriend pulls his mask down and says, “I loved that” with great force.June 3, 2022, Oakland, Fox TheaterThe drive to Oakland passes in a dream of sunshine and grubby rest areas and Starbucks. This is the road trip that has been eluding me since the pandemic started. It turns out I only need a single day of being, as Gram Parsons sang, out with the truckers and the kickers, and I am starting to feel more human. My boyfriend, with the fervor of the newly converted and the completist tendencies unique to music writers, Spotifies his way through the Belle and Sebastian catalog as we drive.At the Fox, in downtown Oakland, I take my spot at the rail. The band fills the stage and the evening unfurls its magic. There’s a mysterious exchange between band and audience at their best shows; their very multitudinousness makes you feel somehow like you’re part of their project. All these other people are in the band, why not you? I forget my fears, I forget to be annoyed by the other audience members, or afraid of them. I lose myself in the sea of fans.When we walk outside, people line the sidewalks, dancing and singing. I had forgotten what it was like to be “out among ‘em,” as my granny used to say. It feels like the world has erupted with joy.The next day we go to the de Young to see a show of Alice Neel paintings. Neel burst into creative flower in midlife. In the 1970s her work became vibrant, celebratory, wicked, funny, communal. Her paintings are crowded with unexpected people wearing violet scarves and robin egg blue eye makeup. I walk around and around the galleries, taking in the spectacle of unending difference. “People Come First,” the show is called.And then I see it, the why of my love: Belle and Sebastian people my world. Their songs are filled with louche, ungovernable characters: the lazy painter Jane, who gets a dose of thrush from licking railings; Judy, who fantasizes about horses; Sukie, who likes to hang out in the graveyard; Hillary and Anthony, who kill themselves because they are bored and misunderstood; Chelsea and Lisa, who find solace in each other’s arms.My own world, over the last few years, has grown smaller and harder. Between divorce and death and quarantine, my soul has shrunk like a wool sweater in a washing machine. Even as I’ve walked alone through my difficulties, trying to solve every problem through sheer force of my solitary will, Belle and Sebastian have kept me company — with the characters they’ve invented, and with the performance of collaboration that defines the band. “We’re four boys in our corduroys,” one of their oldest tunes goes, “we’re not terrific, but we’re competent.” Their bleak cheerfulness has made them my boon companions, even when I was trying my hardest to do everything myself, when I was beginning to see other people as the enemy. They remind me that people come first.We have tickets to shows in Southern California but we’ll abandon the tour and stop here in San Francisco for a while. We’ve gotten what we came for. And we’re awfully old to be driving that far.Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a writer’s life. Claire Dederer is the author of “Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning” and “Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses.” More

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    A Road Trip to Sample America’s Many, Many Music Festivals

    Four classical music festivals. Three children. Two exhausted parents, with a brave grandfather in tow. One bedraggled minivan.It’ll be fun, my wife promised me. Surprisingly, it was.While some of my colleagues have been taking in the mighty festivals of Europe over the past few weeks — premieres in Aix-en-Provence, France, and the charms of Salzburg, Austria — the revival of programming after the darker days of the pandemic affords the adventurous a fresh chance to get better acquainted with the summer offerings here in the United States.There are plenty of them, after all. Several of our major orchestras benefit from their own vacation homes, whether Tanglewood for the Boston Symphony or Blossom for the Cleveland Orchestra, Ravinia outside Chicago or the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Others, not so fortunate in padding their bottom lines with picnickers, play on in their usual halls, or piece together short residencies in various climes.Then there’s Ojai, and Ravinia, and Spoleto, and Caramoor, and Bard, and Cabrillo and many, many more festivals; if your budget stretches and your stomach is strong, you can even take a jet boat down the Colorado to hear “Quartet for the End of Time” in a riverside grotto outside Moab.Attending a music festival in the Rockies offers the chance to combine listening with visiting national parks and resorts like this one, in Vail. Andrew Miller for The New York TimesThe opportunities are endless, but for anyone interested in combining soundscapes with scenery, as our Junior Rangers demand, one road trip through the mountains begs to be explored.My family and I — including children aged 6, 3 and not quite 1 — started with the up-and-coming Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, which is within easy reach of Rocky Mountain National Park. Then it made sense to a climb up to the ski resorts west of Denver — first to Bravo! Vail, then to the next valley for the Aspen Music Festival and School. Jackson Hole, Wyo., didn’t look all that far away, really. There, the Grand Teton Music Festival plays just outside the park of the same name, with Yellowstone National Park an hour to the north. Why not?Of course, we could have left at that, and that would probably have been wise. Still, there’s also an alluring route back south, down through the Canyonlands of Utah and on toward Santa Fe Opera. Tempting.With the rest of the family flying home, I reported on “Tristan und Isolde” and “M. Butterfly” there recently. But what about the other four festivals, which we visited over 12 days in July?They are all quite different, serving discrete audiences in distinct atmospheres even if spending time at some of them is expensive, whatever the ticket price. Each has its own idea of what — and whom — a summer festival should be for, and each turned out to be valuable in its own way.John Adams leading a performance of his composition “City Noir” at the recent Colorado Music Festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesColorado Music FestivalGlance at it from a distance, and you might mistake the auditorium of the Colorado Chautauqua, where this 44 year-old, five-and-a-bit week festival is based, for Wagner’s temple in Bayreuth. Built in 1898, it is perched on Boulder’s southwestern flank, the Flatiron rock formations brooding behind it with hiking trails all around. Get there at the right time, and you can just about hear a rehearsal from the playground down the hill. Our youngest watched deer wandering the grounds from his swing, while I eavesdropped on some John Adams.Fetchingly ramshackle, the wooden hall offers an acoustic that is as comfortable for string quartets as for the festival’s orchestra, and it draws an audience that listens closely. It’s a solid platform, one from which the music director, Peter Oundjian, who has recently taken over the Colorado Symphony in Denver, hopes to turn this festival from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.That’s an easy enough mission to believe in if you have friends like Adams. Contemporary scores are dotted through even the more traditional evenings here, which this season included commissions from Wang Jie and Wynton Marsalis, and there’s a flair to the programming that mixes slightly unusual works with cornerstones of the canon.Peter Oundjian, the festival’s music director, hopes to turn it from a primarily local event to something with broader reach.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesEven so, my visit coincided with the start of a new music week that Adams took part in organizing as composer in residence, albeit without offering any novelties himself. The Attacca Quartet came in for a night to feast on works by Philip Glass and Gabriella Smith, but of the three concerts I heard, the two orchestral programs were most revealing of this festival’s virtues.Take the second: a brief premiere from Timo Andres, “Dark Patterns,” prefaced Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, a violin concerto in disguise that smartly refracts Baroque forms and was played amazingly by the soloist Helen Kim, before Samuel’s father, John, stepped up to conduct his own, pulsating “City Noir.”Adams visibly enjoyed himself on the podium, and with good reason: The festival ensemble is an admirable one. The players mostly hail from regional orchestras — the wind soloists, for instance, include regular-season principals from Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii and Florida — and they come together each summer to play with terrific commitment and no shortage of virtuosity.They can play pretty much anything, too. The first program I heard was one of three that intriguingly paired the piano concertos of Beethoven with works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oundjian busily drew crisp, energetic support for Jan Lisiecki, who was a rather clangorous soloist in the “Emperor” Concerto, but the real shock was the rarefied eloquence that his orchestra lavished on the Vaughan Williams’s World War II-era Fifth Symphony. I’m still thinking about it, weeks later.Concert-goers listening from the lawn seats at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater during the Bravo! Vail summer music festival.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesBravo! VailCelebrating its 35th season, the delightfully friendly Bravo! Vail is an entirely different kind of affair. Digging deep into its donors’ pockets, it brings three major orchestras, as well as a chamber ensemble, to town for six intense weeks of performances, the most prominent of them in a stunning outdoor amphitheater named for the local vacationer-turned-civic-booster Gerald R. Ford (yes, that one).It’s a jaunt that the ensembles clearly value. The fourth one rotates from year to year; this season, it was the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. But the Dallas Symphony Orchestra just signed up to appear through 2024, while the Philadelphia Orchestra is contracted through 2026 and New York Philharmonic through 2027.The magical setting — cradled in forested mountains, the amphitheater abuts a botanical garden and backs onto a creek — doubtless has a lot to do with that, and the players and their families have time to enjoy the ski resort’s abundant amenities.But Juliette Kang, the first associate concertmaster of the Philadelphians, told me during a break in rehearsals that she and her colleagues also take inspiration from the hardy folk who turn down a seat in the pavilion, where the atmosphere is relaxed enough that nobody minded my six year old drawing the flowers behind the stage during Brahms’s Fourth, for the tiered lawn. Out there, where our baby babbled his way through Bruch to no complaints, lightning warnings are routinely ignored and no amount of rain sends the attentive patrons scuttling for cover; tarpaulins, not just golf umbrellas, are necessary here.Classics and pops are mostly what these audiences brave thunderstorms for — the Texans brought the Beatles as well as Beethoven — even if the artistic director, Anne-Marie McDermott, has valiantly begun a commissioning project that this summer saw three premieres reach the main stage. And the chamber music and free community concert series roam more enthusiastically across the repertoire.Nathalie Stutzmann conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Vail festival last month.Andrew Miller for The New York TimesWhile the Philharmonic often uses its time in Vail to test out programs for the Lincoln Center season to come, the Philadelphians repeated pieces from the season prior, given the single rehearsal on offer for each evening. Nathalie Stutzmann, their principal guest conductor, who was on the podium for the two concerts I heard, said she finds that performances seem to breathe more naturally in the mountain air; there was not even a whiff of complacency in hers.Vail’s amphitheater, with its four-paned roof redolent of ski runs, offers fair sound, and though it is a tad reticent with details, it has enough body that the Philadelphians still sounded like the Philadelphians. Deluge be damned, Stutzmann turned in one of the most honestly moving Tchaikovsky Sixths that I have heard.At the Aspen Music Festival, Gil Shaham, left, shared the spotlight with the young cellist Sterling Elliott, performing the Brahms Double Concerto.Tessa NojaimAspen Music Festival and SchoolFor the musical tourist, the problem with Aspen is that its title is a misnomer.Founded in 1949 as part of Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke’s plan to turn a sleepy Colorado town into a haven for the soul and mind alike, this venerable endeavor is best thought of as a finishing school for budding elite musicians, about half of whom now receive a free ride scholarship for the considerable costs.Although plenty of guest artists pass through for recitals, most of the hundreds of performances in the sprawling, eight-week season here have a primarily pedagogical purpose, as the students put to use what they have learned from the enviable faculty. Renée Fleming, no less, now directs the opera program with the conductor Patrick Summers.The festival serves the students, in other words, and the reverse is less the case.Not that Aspen sprawls quite as much as it once did, despite a gorgeous, $75 million campus renovation that was completed in 2016. Wind the clock back a couple of decades, and you would have found a thousand students here; this year, officials had to cut an entire orchestra from the program because of a housing shortage, leaving the student body at 500 or so. Alan Fletcher, Aspen’s chief executive, said that it’s not yet clear whether that number will become the norm.Patrons picnicking outside the Aspen festival’s Benedict Music Tent.Tessa NojaimThe Benedict Music Tent, which succeeded two previous structures as Aspen’s main venue when it opened in 2000, could do with as much of a refresh as the programming, which is dismayingly staid given the usually eclectic tastes of the music director, Robert Spano; next to the ostentatious glamour of the city, the tent looks unkempt. Tickets also don’t come cheap to sit on the hard blue benches indoors, though anyone — families included ­— can listen for free on the meadows outside.That would just about have been worth doing for the concert I heard, a Sunday afternoon feature from the school’s leading ensemble, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, that Fletcher said from the stage was “purely emblematic” of what the school aims to achieve.Faculty take the principal seats while their students play alongside them; alumni often return as soloists, in this case the ever-popular violinist Gil Shaham, who shared the spotlight with the excellent young cellist Sterling Elliott in an engaging Brahms Double Concerto. Although the tent’s acoustic is distant, and the conducting of the guest maestro John Storgards in Saariaho’s “Ciel d’Hiver” and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6 was oddly brusque, the playing standards were high.Grand Teton Music FestivalI’m not sure that the residents of Jackson Hole, whether they are fortunate enough to enjoy their first or their fourth homes in sight of the Grand Tetons, quite understand what they have going for them at Walk Festival Hall, a happily unpretentious, 700-seat indoor theater beside the gondolas in Teton Village.Donald Runnicles, the music director here since 2006, is a no-nonsense man with a no-nonsense festival. Though a piano series started this year and there are weekly chamber music nights to attend — if you, unlike my wife, can tear yourself away from seeing the sun set from the mountaintop — the main attraction is the Festival Orchestra, which operates on a subscription-season schedule, performing programs twice and rehearsing thoroughly.It shows. This is another ensemble made up of players from across the country: some retreat here from orchestras as prestigious as the Boston and Chicago symphonies, while a number usually play in opera pits, including at the Metropolitan Opera, and a few are even conservatory professors who come here to sharpen their performance skills. Some of the musicians stay for the whole season, but most can only manage two or three weeks. If that constantly changing roster might pose problems — five concertmasters are listed in the program book, and 15 horns — it also lends an eagerness to the playing.Donald Runnicles, who has been the Grand Teton music director since 2006, conducting the Festival Orchestra in July.Chris LeeRunnicles, one of the most underrated musicians of his generation, knows how to use it. The all-Russian program I heard was of unerring quality, one in which even a political statement was carefully conceived for its musical value.Before a strong, big-boned account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which is often thought of as the composer’s declaration of liberation after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Pittsburgh Symphony violinist Marta Krechkovsky, whose family remains in Ukraine, played the solo line in Myroslav Skoryk’s “Melody,” which has been in wide use as a hymn to freedom since the Russian invasion. Heard in that context, the Shostakovich became all the more immediate.You could have asked for a mite more focus to the orchestral sound in the concert, though you would struggle to hear a more astounding rendition of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, or anything else to be honest, than the one that soloist Augustin Hadelich contributed.You could ask for a little more variety in Grand Teton’s programming generally, too, although there’s a dexterity to how it incorporates new music — John Adams’s “Absolute Jest” alongside Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” for instance — and it’s no small feat to put on Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and Puccini’s “La Bohème” in a place where bears roam the night.But to quibble like that would be to miss the point; not every festival needs to be an Ojai. What Grand Teton offers, like Bravo! Vail and the Colorado Music Festival in their own ways, is a simpler kind of joy, of good music in glorious surroundings. I know where I’d while away my summer, if I could. More