Olympic Music Festival: Three more weeks of great Olympic performances

For 25 years the Olympic Music Festival has been delighting audiences in an idyllic tract of farmland on the Olympic Peninsula, studded with venerable trees and well-supplied with picnic tables. Concerts are given every Saturday and Sunday afternoon (with the same program both days) from late June to mid-September, in a barn of impressive proportions, seating about 400 people on church pews and hay bales. An evidently devoted public sports a liberal array of shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps. The performers, too, are informally dressed, and the whole atmosphere is convivial and relaxed.

The festival is the brainchild of Alan Iglitzin, formerly the assistant principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and a founder-member of the Philadelphia String Quartet. He started the festival in 1984 and still directs it, plays in many of the concerts and provides unpretentious spoken introductions to the music. You might call the festival a kind of country cousin to the more citified Seattle Chamber Music Society's star-studded summer festival, provided the description is not taken to suggest any inferiority in the level of music-making. An ambitious roster of performers is on hand, from local luminaries like Seattle Symphony principal second violinist Elisa Barston to established and emerging musicians from farther afield, including pianists Paul Hersh and Julio Elizalde, who teach respectively at San Francisco Conservatory and New York's Juilliard School.

This weekend's program includes Joaquín Turina's Piano Quartet and Beethoven's very first published work, the Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 1 No. 1. Hersh, a festival regular, is the pianist, and he will be joined in Brahms' tempestuous Third Violin Sonata, Op. 108, by Michi Wiancko, winner in 2002 of the Concert Artists Guild's prestigious international competition.

Looking ahead

On Aug. 30 and 31, Haydn's B-flat-Major String Quartet, Op. 76 No. 4, known as the "Sunrise," will be followed by the two works that constitute almost the entire core of the repertoire for clarinet and string quartet: Mozart's supremely lyrical Clarinet Quintet in A Major and his younger contemporary Weber's Quintet in B-flat Major. The clarinetist will be Teddy Abrams, a multitalented young man who studies conducting at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, composes copiously and is also a former piano student of Hersh.

Then, on Sept. 6 and 7, the Olympic Music Festival wraps up for the summer with an attractive program of works with piano. Trios by Beethoven (in G Major, Op. 1 No. 2) and Ravel are on the first half, and then Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor — the one with the exhilarating gypsy-style finale — will provide a rousing conclusion to send the Quilcene audience home happy.