Third Coast Review: Benjamin Beilman Amazes at Sun Valley Music Festival

With a fascinating program celebrating the change of seasons and the Americana of Sun Valley, Idaho, violinist Benjamin Beilman, festival Music Director Alasdair Neale, and festival musicians entertained large audiences at the Sun Valley Music Festival Winter Season. Three free concerts took place March 19-21. Louis Harris, who saw two performances, comments:

The first half of the program was intended to focus on the American experience rooted in Sun Valley, including nature, great vistas, fun road trips, and general Americana. It started with a work for solo violin that Beilman commissioned in 2022: Sanguineum by Gabriella Smith, who was a student with Beilman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Beilman explained how Smith is an environmental preservationist who, in a restoration project, planted sanguineum on an abandoned navy air base in California’s bay area, where she’s from. Native to the western US, this red currant flower is a deciduous shrub that is beautiful in the spring. (…)

I always have some trepidation when hearing a personal favorite [Copland’s Appalachian Spring, in the original version for 13 players]. Will this performance be any good? The answer became clear in the opening measures when the musicians produced a sound that had more lushness than any other performance I’ve ever heard. I love the way Copland has the various instruments playing off one another, and, under Neale’s direction, these musicians interacted with such precision, it was like they had been playing together for decades.

Read the full piece on Third Coast Review.

This year’s main festival is scheduled from Monday, July 27, through Thursday, August 20. For more information, visit svmusicfestival.org.

Alasdair Neale and Benjamin Beilman