LEISURE & ARTS
Red-Rock Music
By CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Moab, Utah
Nestled along the Colorado River and wedged between the Arches and Canyonlands national parks, the town of Moab mostly draws visitors in search of extremes. Mountain bikers test their mettle on the bone-jarring Slickrock Trail; off-road 4x4s with outlandishly big tires crawl up petrified sand dunes; flocks of Cessnas drop skydivers over the baking-hot desert.
Yet for two weeks a year, this adrenaline-fueled town makes room for a small crowd of classical-music lovers and out-of-town musicians who come here for a series of concerts that explore more subtle extremes of intimacy with nature—and silence.
Held in a grotto on the banks of the Colorado River, the Moab Music Festival runs through Sept. 10.
On a recent early afternoon, horn soloist Eric Ruske stood on a ledge at the back of a red-rock grotto on the banks of the Colorado, playing the folk-inflected “Horn Call” by Norwegian composer Sigurd Berge. In between phrases he paused briefly, waiting for the echo to toss his notes back at him from the other side of the river.
The audience of about 80 had arrived in a fleet of open jetboats, then scrambled up a steep, sandy embankment, pushing aside drooping willow branches, to reach the grotto. Some had climbed up onto the natural tiers formed by the waters that rush down the grotto in springtime; most settled down in the black canvas chairs that had been set up in curving rows opposite a Steinway grand piano. The tech crew had brought the instrument down-river earlier that morning, but by the time pianist Pedja Muzijevic sat down to play the first notes of Franz Schubert’s Trio in E flat it was already covered in a thin film of red dust. Next to him, violinist Jennifer Frautschi and cellist Tanya Tomkins played barefoot, digging their toes into the rust-colored sand. In the third movement, marked “Scherzando,” a Cactus Wren chimed in with a metronomelike call that was stubbornly at odds with Schubert’s tempo…
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