A Little Wilderness Music

It started with The Walkers, a group of women who meet no matter what every morning at 7:15 in the Church of St. John in the Wilderness parking lot in Copake Falls, NY. These walkers are interesting people, Sharon Powers says. Community minded, smart, creative. So when they asked her to organize a small concert at the church year before last, Powers, a professional flutist and teacher, checked out the church acoustics (“magical,” she found) and said yes. She played Debussy’s mournful “Syrinx,” she recalls, and a Handel sonata. And she started thinking about bringing more performers here. Which is why this rustic piece of 19th-century Gothic Revival (designed by Richard Upjohn) rang with Mozart, Ibert, Joplin and others last Sunday, in the latest in a series of Winds in the Wilderness Concerts organized by Powers and supported by lots of people in Copake Falls. “We want to please our audience,” Powers says, which accounts for her a-little-something-for-everybody approach to programming. At the latest concert, a quintet — Powers, flute; Ronald Lively, clarinet; Joanne Nelson-Unczur, oboe; Hohn Howland, French horn; and Zafer Leo Ponter, bassoon ­— opened with Mozart’s brilliant overture to “The Marriage of Figaro,” transcribed for winds, of course. This version was appropriately heraldic, like the original scoring, but nicely transparent, too. The way chamber music ought to be. You can hear who is playing every line. A romantic piece by a rarely heard 19th-century composer, August Klughardt (1847-1902), followed, then “Three Brief Pieces” by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), gave the bassoon its chance to shine, and then a masterful and sensuous tango, “Oblivion,” by Argentine-born composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) stole the show. With its Middle Eastern strains and Latin rhythm, and baroque shapes and just plain sultry aura this work, which has been arranged for a variety of instruments, from a quartet of cellos to a quintet of woodwinds was remarkable. And, finally, Powers led the group playing Scott Joplin’s (1867-1917) “Maple Leaf Rag,” something to send people out the door in good spirits, she says. More concerts are in the works, the next on April 10. And though the performers are under rehearsed, the mission to bring fine music to this very small community, and the will to celebrate inventive and fascinating composers make these concerts a pleasure.