Shift Festival Showcases Innovative Orchestras

For admirers and fans of orchestral music — for lovers of music, period — Washington, in a collaborative effort by Washington Performing Arts and the Kennedy Center, is seeing a phenomenal burst of musical performances this week, opening up the whole concept of what we think of and hear when we regard the orchestra.

Shift, a weeklong immersive festival that began today and runs through April 1, casts a spotlight on North American orchestras. According to Washington Performing Arts, Shift “provides a national platform for today’s most innovative orchestras to share a sampling of their most creative and provocative work that embodies the individual orchestra’s identity, community, and artistic vision.”

While size, as has often been said, isn’t everything, it does make a difference to this festival, which is about diversity — not only of groups, but of venues and, most importantly, music itself.

A major performance spotlight shines on the Kennedy Center, with four featured orchestras performing in the Concert Hall. However, all four will be buttressed by residency activities — performance and educational — in different venues across the city, not to mention opportunities to lobby their respective representatives.

The Boulder Philharmonic, from Colorado, will perform tomorrow, March 28. Its program, on the theme of “Nature and Music,” includes a commissioned work by composer Stephen Lias with projected photographic images of the Rocky Mountains, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. There will also be a mandolin concerto, “From the Blue Ridge,” composed by and featuring mandolinist Jeff Kidkiff. Fittingly, the concert finale is a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” with the Frequent Fliers dance troupe.

On March 29, the North Carolina Symphony offers a program resonant of the state’s history with works by native composers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Mason Bates and Robert Ward.

On March 31, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will present the commissioned work “Creator/Creation” by composer Christopher Theofanidis, a theatrical and multimedia oratorio with soloists, a 280-member choir and full orchestra.

On April 1, the Knights, a “deeply cooperative and creative chamber orchestra” from Brooklyn, will take the spotlight, with a program that includes the San Francisco Girls Chorus led by Lisa Bielawa. The program also features works by Brahms, Vivaldi and Aaron Jay Kernis, and a piece written collaboratively by the members of the orchestra.

All four orchestras have residency activities, including walking tours by musicians, chamber concerts and choral workshops and, for the Knights, a chamber performance in a nontraditional venue — that being the 14th Street jazz venue the Hamilton — with the music of singer-songwriter Christina Courtin and pop-classical pianist Holly Bowling on March 31.

The hyphen comes into play a lot during the course of this festival; there’s a decided collaborative spirit to everything, mixing up venues and genres of music.

The Knights, from Brooklyn, are probably the most characteristically collaborative group in the festival, because they came out of an atmosphere of regular, informal get-togethers of different sorts of musicians. The group has an album out this week with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Colin Jacobsen and his brother Eric are the artistic directors of the group, which has a hefty 30 artists forming the orchestra. “I have to tell you, it’s so amazing to be a part of this festival, playing at the Kennedy Center [a first] and the Hamilton [another first]. What they’re doing here is unheard of, the scope of it in terms of performance, the variety and diversity, the themes. I think it gives a picture of what the world of orchestras really consists of, the opportunities, centered around the country itself. It’s about the fabric of America itself, and the fabric of American music.

“Our own program is representative of that — the classical, traditional works by Vivaldi and Brahms, for instance, and Christina’s work in a different venue,” he said.

“What our aim is, and we see a lot of that happening, is to find common spaces where people gather together to listen to different sorts of orchestras — the big halls, but also smaller spaces, even living rooms and clubs.”

He and his brother are cofounders of the Knights. “I’m the one with the beard and I play violin. Eric plays cello,” he explained. “We’re from Brooklyn, we grew up on classical music, we used to have gatherings in our house — our parents were part of this world, too — and people would come and play music together. That’s the way the orchestra started, too. It’s like-minded musicians, composers, friends, and things sort of evolved.”

The performing arts today are trying to find ways to attract new audiences, with contemporary music as well as traditional music. “Music begins as notes on a page, there’s a depth of learning and discipline in that,” Jacobsen said. “But we, the musicians, also have to know how to listen to each other, and the audience has to be able to listen closely to this music. It’s developing empathy for the details, as well as the emotional impact.”

The four Shift concerts in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall have been ticketed uniformly at $25.