In Nature’s Own Concert Hall, Sound Is Forever
MOAB, Utah, Sept. 17 – It is a rare music festival that requires patrons to sign a risk waiver as they purchase tickets. But that is one of the peculiarities of the Moab Music Festival, which takes the idea of outdoor concerts to the extreme by ferrying musicians, guests and instruments – including, on Thursday, a Steinway grand piano – 15 miles along the Colorado River for a late afternoon performance in a towering red-rock grotto.
The festival, with a variety of classical, bluegrass, jazz and chamber music, includes two concerts in the grotto. The two grotto shows neatly combine culture with the area’s reputation for adventure travel.
To put on a concert in a sandy alcove 45 miles from town, preparation begins as the sun rises, with the meticulously wrapped piano being loaded on a metal motor boat and taken to the grotto. In years past the piano had to be borrowed, but the Steinway now used was the festival’s first capital acquisition, paid for mostly with donations.
For the performance, the 14 musicians headed down the river for some rehearsal time in the grotto at mid-morning, and the 100 or so patrons started their trip to the concert site shortly after noon. The grotto is tucked in from the river’s edge by a thicket of shrubs and trees.
It’s the rare natural acoustics of the grotto that attracts musicians from all over. “This is our Carnegie Hall,” said Mr. Barrett, who on this day also played piano and turned pages for other pianists. “God made this one and Carnegie made the other one. I refer to this as my personal church.”
Before beginning the concert with Claude Debussy’s “Images,” the San Francisco-based pianist Paul Hersh asked that everyone sit and simply absorb the silence for “5 to 10 seconds.” Indeed, the silence is complete in the grotto with only an occasional breeze rustling the leaves to interrupt. The music does not bounce or echo off the spiraling multi-story rocks but instead fills the natural chamber.
“The mindset of people is very different here,” Ms. Tomkins said. “Their senses are engaged with the physical beauty, and they are almost more receptive to sound. You couldn’t get an audience to sit in total silence in a concert hall for 10 seconds!”
Bryant Summerhays of Salt Lake City came to the show with a friend. “Classical music deserves to be heard in nature,” he said. “The intimacy and the isolation of this is what make it so amazing.”
This summer’s concerts were sold out, and tickets for next year are already selling.
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