ON the MAW Beat
The Music Academy of the West (MAW) festival is preparing to kick into full swing over the next several weeks, giving local music lovers plenty of options for getting away from the home entertainment center (live music is always livelier than the screen option, anyway). Two of the proven commodities on the recommended MAW fare list show up on this week’s radar — the always provocative and also entertaining Percussionfest, Wednesday night at Hahn Hall, and this Friday’s kickoff to the centerpiece Academic Fellows Orchestra blowouts at The Granada Theatre (all subsequent orchestra concerts take place on Saturdays, except for the opener). (See story here.)
Percussionfest is one of those Music Academy traditions whose appeal reaches across demographics, beyond the classical nerd community. Blame it on the broad powers of propulsive rhythmic material and creative change-ups in terms of what constitutes percussion instruments. Percussion faculty head Michael Werner, principal percussionist with the Seattle Symphony and longtime Academy faculty favorite, has a habit of introducing his study curriculum by sending fellows to Home Depot, a repository of household objects ripe for repurposing as contemporary-music percussion tools. This year, the schedule also includes a special added performance for families on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. in Hahn Hall.
Americana of the jazz/classical sort will be the highlight of Friday’s pre-holiday orchestra concert, courtesy of the oft-heard but always welcome American in Paris by Gershwin. Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 occupies the program’s other half. Still, the focus is on our brave and embattled national fabric, in musical terms, in keeping with this festival’s general theme, “An American Mosaic.”…