By Fredric Dannen
The telephone rang one winter day in late 2008, and Anthony McGill, a classical clarinetist, did not recognize the caller’s number. The voice on the line belonged to someone who purported to represent Yo-Yo Ma, the world-famous cellist. Several years earlier, McGill had played with Ma in a chamber ensemble in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall but had had no interaction with him since. Now, if the call was genuine, McGill was receiving an offer from Ma to perform with him, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and pianist Gabriela Montero at the January 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” McGill says. At the time, he was principal clarinetist for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and though recognized as one of the few African Americans to hold a first chair in a major orchestra, his was scarcely a household name. But Ma had followed his career, and the composer John Williams had written a quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano for Obama’s inaugural. The call was no joke, and McGill’s performance for the new President was seen by more than 40 million television viewers and tens of millions more on the internet. “It’s still almost like a dream,” McGill says.
Since September 2014, McGill has been the principal clarinetist for the New York Philharmonic. He is a frequent concerto soloist with top orchestras around the world and a chamber musician in high demand, lauded by the New York Times for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound, and rich character.” In 2020, he was awarded the Avery Fischer Prize, one of classical music’s highest honors. He has never performed in San Miguel de Allende. But that is about to change.
On Friday and Saturday, August 12 and 13, McGill will join the Gryphon Trio, ranked as Canada’s best piano trio, for the opening weekend of the 44th edition of the San Miguel de Allende Chamber Music Festival. The festival has been absent from the public stage for two years because of the pandemic. Now it is returning in full force, with 14 top-tier musicians, some of them, like McGill, making their San Miguel debuts.
This year the festival includes six concerts over three weekends, from August 12 through August 27, all at 7pm at the Teatro Angela Peralta. All seats are reserved. Ticket prices range from 950 pesos for boxes and front orchestra down to 300 pesos for the center of the second balcony. (Side seats in the second balcony will be sold at the door before each concert for a student price, to be determined.) Boleto City is the exclusive ticketing agency for the festival. Tickets can be purchased online at boletocity.com or at the Boleto City box office on the ground floor of Mercado Sano, Ancha de San Antonio 123, Monday through Saturday from 11am to 5pm or at the will-call desk in the Peralta lobby starting one hour before each concert.
During the opening weekend, McGill and the Gryphon will perform works of Messiaen, Dvorák, Grieg, and Brahms, among other composers. On Thursday, August 18, the pianist Orion Weiss, who has played concertos with all the top-ranked American orchestras, will make his San Miguel debut in a solo recital featuring works of Rachmaninoff, Grieg, and Samuel Barber. On Saturday, August 20, the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet, with Weiss as a guest, will present music by Beethoven, Brahms, and Felipe Lara. For the closing weekend, Friday and Saturday, August 26 and 27, San Miguel audiences will be introduced to one of the hottest ensembles in classical music, the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. The Friday concert consists of four challenging works, including Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden), while the Saturday concert pairs Brooklyn Rider with Mexican jazz legend Magos Herrera in a crossover concert called “Dreamers: Songs from the Ibero-American Songbook.”
Another First
The Chamber Music Festival has been around for 44 seasons, but this year brings something new: FASMA, the Festival de las Artes, San Miguel de Allende, which runs from August 11 through August 21 and comprises more than 70 cultural events—musical, theatrical, cinematic, literary, and visual. FASMA was born of a cooperation agreement signed by some 30 cultural institutions in San Miguel, including the Chamber Music Festival, with the goal of enhancing the city’s status as a cultural tourist destination.
The Chamber Music Festival has already helped put the city on the world’s cultural map. Funded mainly by private donations, it cannot match the fees offered by comparable institutions in larger cities, but the most in-demand artists still come to San Miguel to perform, and frequently come back. One reason is the lure of the city itself and its warm and welcoming audiences. Another reason is the atypical format of the festival, which invites artists to choose their own repertoire and never repeat a work from concert to concert. “The San Miguel format is wonderful,” says one musician. “It’s like a mini-residency.”
This year, the Gryphon Trio will be making its fourth appearance at the festival, and the Parker Quartet its third. Jazz singer Magos Herrera, under the festival’s auspices, gave a sold-out concert this past April at the El Obraje amphitheater in San Miguel. But festival attendees will also see some new faces and hear repertoire never before offered.
Star Power
“When you’re named after one of the biggest constellations in the night sky, the pressure is on to display a little star power.” So wrote the Washington Post of pianist Orion Weiss, who debuts in San Miguel for the festival’s second weekend. The Post concluded that Weiss “did exactly that,” turning in “a high-powered and often ferocious” performance imbued with “exceptionally clean technique» and “virtuosity to spare.” At his solo recital on August 18, apart from Romantic piano favorites, Weiss will perform the fiendishly difficult Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor by Samuel Barber, a composer best known for his haunting Adagio for Strings. The work premiered in Havana in 1949, with Vladimir Horowitz at the keyboard. Since then, it has been performed publicly only by pianists with nerves and fingers of steel.
Brooklyn Rider has been the recipient of ecstatic reviews, often containing nouns and adjectives rarely employed by classical music critics. “They are four classical musicians performing with the energy of young rock stars jamming on their guitars … making classical music accessible but also celebrating why it was good in the first place,” wrote a reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced the radical emotional range of [a late Beethoven quartet] more intensely,” said the New York Times.
As for Anthony McGill, the excitement of his August 12 debut will be compounded by that concert’s showpiece, Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (Quartet for the End of Time), a work for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, composed in 1940. The usual combination of instruments was a factor of the musicians who were available to perform it—French POWs who, like Messiaen, were being held captive at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany. “It’s an amazing work,” McGill says, and the very composition he had played with Yo-Yo Ma in Japan, with life-altering consequences.
