REVIEW: Sevenars Music Festival, "Opening Family & Friends Concert"

The Academy, Worthington, MA

www.sevenars.org

July 14, 2024

by Michael J. Moran

Davis James, 1947-2025

The opening concert of this beloved summer festival’s 56th season was dedicated “in loving tribute to David Frank James,” who died two months ago. Husband of the late Robelyn Schrade-James (after whose parents and their five children, all having first names that start with R, the festival is named), David was a frequent Sevenars pianist. Today’s program honored his memory and celebrated his legacy.

After a brief, heartfelt eulogy, David’s daughter, pianist Lynelle James, played a charming “Two Little Birds,” by Frank Hutchens, which David, a fellow New Zealander, had brought to Carnegie Hall in his debut there. Family friend and regular Sevenars guest pianist Clifton J. (Jerry) Noble then introduced and premiered an affecting “Elegy for David” that he wrote for this occasion, based on the letters of David’s name and performed with noble gravitas.

Host and pianist Rorianne Schrade next offered a jubilant “Etude-Tableau” in E-flat Major, Op. 33/7, a rare work of pure joy by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which she first heard David play. After echoing his sister’s earlier sentiments, David’s son Christopher, primarily a cellist, nonetheless delivered a rip-roaring solo piano rendition of Franz Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” a concert favorite of his father.

Lynelle then joined her aunt Rorianne (sitting in for the originally scheduled David) in a vividly expressive reading of Johannes Brahms’s two-piano arrangement of his “Variations on a Theme by Haydn.”

 

Noble next partnered Rorianne in an exuberantly jazzy take on George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in its original two-piano version in this 100th anniversary year of its debut. Lynelle rejoined Rorianne for a colorfully virtuosic "Jupiter" from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite “The Planets” in a seldom-heard arrangement by the composer for two pianos during this 150th anniversary year of his birth.

 

The program’s closing surprise was inspired by Rorianne’s memory of her late mother, Rolande Young-Schrade, lamenting how hard it was to gather her musical family in one room. So after Rorianne began playing her own arrangement of the lively “Dargason” from Holst’s “St. Paul’s Suite,” other members of the extended Schrade-James family entered one by one to join her, from Lynelle and Noble to Rorianne’s husband Jeff and Lynelle’s toddler son Robie, as she held him and shook his rattle. It was magical, and David would have loved it.

Remaining Sevenars concerts, next presenting renowned local violist-violinist Ron Gorevic, are scheduled for Sundays July 21-August 18 at 4 pm.