Sabbatical In Sandpoint Summer Retreat Hardly A Vacation For Schuller, Who Returns To Direct Finale Of The Festival At Sandpoint
Gunther Schuller claims to be taking a “sabbatical” this summer. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
The conductor-composer-teacher-writer-publisher-producer who has guided The Festival at Sandpoint since 1985 is back in North Idaho to lead the Spokane Symphony in the festival’s concluding concert Saturday at Sandpoint’s Memorial Field, complete with a fireworks finale.
True, Schuller has not undertaken his usual exhausting schedule at Sandpoint of conducting, teaching, planning chamber music programs and coaching soloists.
But the program he has planned with the orchestra is not a modest little affair of familiar favorites.
The central work Saturday will be Sergei Rachmaninoff’s monumental Symphony No. 2 along with Charles Griffes’ “The White Peacock” and George Whitfield Chadwick’s “Jubilee.” Schuller’s own orchestration of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 54, will receive its world premiere at this concert.
The orchestration of the Beethoven Sonata came about as a byproduct of yet another Schuller project - a series recordings of all 32 Beethoven sonatas with pianist Russell Sherman, for which Schuller serves as producer and artistic adviser.
Earlier this summer, Schuller spent a month of his sabbatical conducting in New Zealand and Australia.
Then he flew to Europe to lead a conducting seminar in Maastrich, Holland, conduct in a music festival at Davos, Switzerland, and sit on the jury of the Mitropoulos Competition in Athens, Greece.
Without a touch of irony, Schuller said before he left for New Zealand, “This will be the first summer in 33 summers that I would have some time to myself and actually be home, sit on my porch and contemplate my beautiful garden.
“I am also starting on my autobiography this summer,” Schuller added. “And that’s something I need some time for. I was a Tanglewood for 22 years and now it’s been 11 years at Sandpoint. I’m looking forward to summer without all of that.”
In May, Schuller received the gold medal for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has also received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Music, a MacArthur Fountain “genius award,” and the Peabody Medal among a long list of other awards, fellowships and honorary degrees.
Schuller’s most recent book, “The Compleat Conductor,” is being released later this month by Oxford University Press. His recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Brahms’ First Symphony on the GM label, designed to accompany the book, is already in record stores.
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