Classical Art Crawl - Great Idea

Someone had a very good idea: a musical art crawl. And they found a good place to hold it: St. Paul's Lowertown. I guess it's been going on for a few years now. I read about it only the other day in Pamela Espeland's ArtSpace column.

Here's the idea. Various musical ensembles perform the same fifteen minutes of music four times during a two-hour span at venues in close proximity to one another. During the fifteen-minute intervals between sets, listeners are free to come up to chat with the performers or make their way to a nearby venue to hear something different.

During the next two hours, the ensembles and the selections change but the venues remain the same.

The six venues involved in this "classical crawl" were located in two buildings two blocks apart, making it easy to move from one to another without missing a performance. Brilliant. And fifteen minutes turned out to be ample time for a group to create a mood and display some musicality. In fact, it was downright refreshing.

I spent a good part of the morning before the event rearranging the performances listed in the online schedule by time-slot rather than venue, and came up with a musical itinerary that seem eminently doable. But as long as we were going to travel all the way across town from Minneapolis, I thought our first stop ought to be for lunch.

 Salty Tart was simply great. As it happens, we had eaten recently at two of Kim Bartmann's Minneapolis spots—Red Stag and Book Club. Both were distinctly "okay." Salty Tart reminded us of the word "flavor." My mushroom galette had that wild mushroom oomph. I don't remember what-all was in Hilary's dish but avocados and salsa were involved, and it was tasty. Bottomless cup of great coffee. Then on to the show.

We started off in the Baroque Room, located on the second floor of the Northwestern Building. A group called Flying Forms performed  J. S. Bach's Organ Trio Sonata in D Minor, BWV 527. Sprightly, then mellow. 

Right down the hall at Studio Z we tapped into  an engaging  improvisatory rendering of Pauline Oliveros's "The Well and the Gentle" (1982) performed by Zeitgeist on clarinet, piano, and vibes. Clarinetest Pat O'Keefe explained that an Oliveros composition consists not of notes but of pitches and text describing what the music is supposed to sound like. Beyond that, the musicians are on their own. He has worked with the composer personally and emphasized how important that is to getting the music right.

To me the performance sounded less random that "free" jazz often does. I liked it. I took a photo of the score. It might have been interesting to hear it four times rather than only once; I imagine that each iteration was significantly different. But we had other fish to fry, and climbed six flights of stairs to hear a group called Ladyslipper perform French lute and viol music of the 17th century by Lambert, Sainte Colombe, Gaultier.

From there we wandered down the street to the Nautilus Music Theater to hear the members of the Skylark Opera Theatre do a few arias. By this point in our itinerant  program the vigor of a well-trained human voice sounded heavenly.

 Then it was back to STUDIO Z  to hear the Pavia Wind Quintet perform transcriptions of some frothy spring-like piano pieces by Debussy, Poulenc, and Nino Rota. Once again, the brief performance times and the abrupt mood changes between genres were refreshing. It was as if I was listening harder, or easier—no time to drift off—in the knowledge that the event would soon be over.

 Our final stop was at the Black Dog Café to hear a couple of crisp movements from Mozart's Divertimento in Eb Major for String Trio, K. 563, performed by members of the Mill City String Quartet. In comparison to the Renaissance ensembles we'd heard earlier, the sound was louder, brighter, more concise...and let's face it, there's a reason Mozart is a household name, while Lambert, Sainte Colombe, and Gaultier are not.

The musicality, the diversity, and the logistical flexibility of this event commend it equally, I think. It's a great promotional opportunity for the ensembles involved, and to top it all off, everything is free. There are plenty of places to pick up a glass of wine or some food if you're so inclined. And you might even run into someone you know.

We bumped into local percussionist and old family friend Eric Corsen; MPR celebrity Steve Staruch, who filled us in on the early history of this event; and our next door neighbor Alice. By the time we got home, I was eager to reacquaint myself with my ten-CD set of William Byrd's complete harpsichord music.  

And even that sounded good.