Deer Valley fest is tuning up

The Deer Valley Music Festival will be in full swing this next week with a lineup of varied concerts.

The events begin Wednesday with the chamber orchestra playing a program titled "Haydn Seek," conducted by Keith Lockhart and featuring guest cellist Alexandre Bouzlov playing the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto.

"During the last few years," Lockhart said, "we've done so much Mozart in the context of the chamber orchestra concerts that we decided to switch gears a bit and focus a little bit on Haydn in this year's festival. We're doing the Haydn C Major cello concerto and the Haydn 'Military' symphony (No. 100 in G major), with a wonderful piece in front of it by Dominic Argento, the 20th-century American composer. It's called 'Royal Invitation: Homage to the Queen of Tonga,' which I think is a wonderful piece.

"He actually said it's a divertimento in the spirit of Haydn and was written in the mid-1950s. It was inspired by a newspaper article that he read about Elizabeth II's coronation. All of her subject nations' representatives came, and everyone else was very buttoned-down and formal-looking, but the Queen of Tonga showed up wearing flowing tribal robes, and was over 6 feet tall, and huge in all ways, and generous of personality and everything. He thought that was such an amusing scene that it was inspiration for that piece."

Thursday's concert will feature the Muir Quartet on the Guest Chamber series at St. Mary's Church in Park City, although, as Lockhart pointed out, they're hardly guests. "Muir, of course, has been coming to Salt Lake for 22 years now, every year. So they've been the resident chamber ensemble of Snowbird, and then the Deer Valley Institute, and then when we established a chamber-music season, they were the obvious choice to be the resident ensemble. They are present for about three weeks during the summer, teaching young quartets and well as performing concerts themselves, so we're just welcoming them back."

The program includes Haydn's Quartet Op. 64 No. 4 in G Major, Joan Tower's Quintet for Piano and Strings, "Dumbarton Quintet," and Franz Schubert's Quartet in D minor, Op. Posth., "Death and the Maiden."

Friday's Classical concert will feature Lise de la Salle at the piano playing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1, and Lockhart at the podium. Respighi's "The Pines of Rome" and "Fountains of Rome" will be on the program, along with Rossini's "Cenerentola" overture.

Guest conductor Gerald Steichen will step up to the podium on Saturday night to conduct "Bravo Broadway." "That's a perennial thing," said Lockhart. "We have them every year, both in context of the main season at Abravanel Hall and out in the summer, as well."