The Colorado Quartet presented a very meditative, moving conclusion to the Gretna Music’s 2008-2009 season at Elizabethtown College Sunday evening with Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.” The work is framed by an introduction and a dramatic finale, and four local clergymen — Father David Danneker, Pastor William N. Jackson, Pastor Greg Davidson Laszakovits and Pastor David Martin — provided short meditations on the words before the seven sections.
Haydn’s music illuminates the words of the dying Jesus with the subtlest of harmonic touches and “hushed, heartbeat pulsations” (as Carl Kane put it in his program notes). Emotional high points were the harmonic twists and turns in section 1, “Father, forgive them;” the plaintive “calling” notes in section III, “Dear woman, here is your son;” the yearning melody of section IV, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the interplay of the violins in section VI, “It is finished.” Section VII, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” a summation and conclusion to the previous sections, conveyed an atmosphere of deep peace. The quartet’s performance emphasised the silences as well as the notes, echoing the slowing breaths of a dying man and opening up the texture. Into these gaps pour our attention, our thoughts, our prayers. The finale, “The Earthquake,” was all the more devastating by comparison, harsh, loud, sudden, jerking the listener back into the world.
With the conclusion of this year’s series, attention turns to the summer festival, Music at Gretna 2009. The series, which starts July 31, runs through August and concludes Sept. 6, will have a certain folk inflection, with performances by the Mose Allison Trio, the Duquesne Tamburitzans, Le Vent du Nord playing traditional music from Quebec, and Leon Redbone on the roster. Classical performers include the Wister Quartet, with violist Kerri Ryan and guitarist Allen Krantz in separate concerts; the Chestnut Brass Company; the Momenta String Quartetl; the Trio Solisti; the Audubon Quartet, with flutist Carl Ellenberger, clarinetist James Campbell and harpist Jude Mollenhauer in one concert and bassist Emilio Gravagno in an all-Dvorak program. A performance of Pergolesi’s opera “La Serva Padrona” is also scheduled. Jazz performers will include the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, drummer Rob Henderson and the Karenda Devroop Trio, the Cedar Walton Trio, the Phil Giordano Jazz Orchestra, singers Claudia Acuna and Hilary Kole.
Looking even further ahead, Gretna Music’s 2009-2010 season at Elizabethtown College includes duo pianists Marcantonio Barone and Charles Abramovic, the Raleigh Ringers (the pre-eminent handbell choir in the U.S., according to Gretna Music), the Vienna Boys Choir, Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with cellist Truls Mørk.
