American music kicks off Summerfest concerts
By PAUL HORSLEY
The Kansas City Star

Joshua Hood of North Carolina has been Summerfest bassoonist since 1998.


Summerfest 2007
Saturday concerts are at 7 p.m. at White Recital Hall, 4949 Cherry. Sunday concerts are at 5 p.m. at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 1307 Holmes.
Four-concert package costs $75, three concerts are $55. Single tickets are $25 ($20 for seniors, $10 student rush tickets available 30 minutes before each show).
Call 816-235-6222 or go to summerfestkc.org.

July 7-8: Music of Argento, Harbison, Still, Foote and Copland

July 14-15: Music of Couperin, Mackey, Françaix, Boeddecker and Mahler

July 21-22: Music of Moravec, Broughton and Telemann

July 28-29: Music of Gandolfi, Villa-Lobos and Beethoven
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American composers often score highest when they stick to what they know.
Just as Shostakovich wove Russian tunes into his symphonies and Mahler hid drinking-songs in his, Ives and Copland struck true when they used material that Americans recognize.
This Saturday and Sunday, Summerfest Concerts begins its four-weekend season of chamber music with an all-American program that includes “Songs America Loves to Sing,” a more recent musical “quilt” by John Harbison scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano.
“He was thinking about pieces that his parents and grandparents would have known, common everyday music everyone would know,” said Summerfest artistic co-director Jane Carl, who also plays clarinet in this top-drawer group. “But he transforms these pieces in his own way.”
With everything from hymns to blues and “We Shall Overcome,” Harbison’s piece “elicits a giggle, but it’s very effective,” said fellow artistic co-director Nancy Beckmann. “And at the end we all play harmonicas.”
The New Jersey-born Harbison, who is 68, represents a classic blend of American vigor (his primary teacher at Harvard was Walter Piston, preeminent American contrapuntalist) and European complexity (Boris Blacher was his mentor in Berlin).
Accordingly his music is approachable but often surprisingly dense. “Songs America Loves to Sing” uses familiar tunes in complicated settings, which the composer said “will still be recognizable.”
“If we know the tunes, our enjoyment of the pieces is enhanced,” Harbison wrote in a program note. “It is my hope that choosing well-known material will make these settings transparent.”
Nostalgia plays a role in Harbison’s vision, too, as it did with Bach, Mahler or Shostakovich.
“It is a distant, quaint vision,” he wrote, “the family around the piano singing familiar songs, a Currier and Ives print, an album of sepia photographs. But I remember it well (or did I imagine it?).”
The opening Summerfest program also features Kansas City favorite Rebecca Lloyd, who will lend her soprano to Domenic Argento’s fascinating “Six Elizabethan Songs” and Copland’s “As It Fell Upon a Day,” the latter a setting of a bizarre, witty little Lewis Carroll verse.
The program is filled out by “Panamanian Dances” by 20th-century African-American composer William Grant Still and “Saraband and Rigaudon” by Arthur Foote.
Summerfest continues each Saturday and Sunday through July. Tickets are available at Central Ticket Office at 816-235-6222.