Swallows swoop to Mozart at concert

Victoria Times Colonist
(Registration Required)
7/11/2014
Sarah Petrescu, Times Colonist
Published: Tuesday, July 11, 2014
WHAT: Concert in the Barn at Penfold Farm
WHERE: Penfold Farm, 1444 Maple Bay Rd., Duncan
WHEN: Sunday, July 9
FOR MORE INFO: 250-746-8654
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With its country-barn setting, surrounding gardens and winding-drive location, the concert at Penfold Farm was more of a total experience than a performance.
Concert-goers sat on haystacks and lawnchairs in the cool shade of the converted Maple Bay Road barn for the Sunday afternoon show featuring Austria’s greatest composers and five first-rate string players.
Farm musk was thick in the air, a family of swallows dove in and out of their nest high in the wood rafters, and a modest stage was strung with white lights and lanterns.
It’s a casual setting to hear “serious” music, but intimate enough that it is not distracting. It was also clear from the packed house and nods and waves that these were dedicated fans.
Despite the open-air concept, the sound was surprisingly good, even uniquely so.
In Schubert’s Rosamunde String Quartet Opus 29 in A minor, Joyce Ellwood’s cello playing reverberated with an earthy richness not heard in a concert-hall setting. Each instrument was piercingly clear, though the volume was low in the rickety barn, which made utter quietness in the audience essential and the squawking swallows not-so-quaint by the end of the first piece on the program, a selection from Haydn’s The Emperor quartet in C Minor Opus 76, No. 3.
In the second half of the concert, Mozart was honoured (in light of the 250 anniversary of his birth in Austria) with the Quintetto VI for 2 violas K.516, featuring Ellwood, violinists Muge Buyukcelen and Mariana Lorens, and violists Mieka Kohut and Donna Robertson. Seeing five talented women play this music together was especially profound — given that female musicians had been shut out of professional performance for most of the time since the composer’s era. Only in recent decades have women had the opportunity to earn a full place in orchestras around the world.
The concert at Penfold Farm is part of a series, organized by illustrator Ken Hicks. Hicks runs the successful summer series, now in its sixth year, almost entirely by word of mouth, with no outside financial support or major advertising. The key to this concert series is nabbing tickets before they sell out. During intermission, Hicks had a lineup of people wanting to buy tickets to his next shows, which include Russian composers on Aug. 6, and German composers on Sept. 3.