‘Beer and Beethoven’ among highlights
In 2015, two twentysomething musicians with roots in central Ohio created a chamber music festival with a difference.
Co-founded by violinist Siwoo Kim and violist John Stulz, the VIVO Music Festival has performed in settings grand, intimate and unexpected — from the Southern Theatre to the Columbus Museum of Art and Hot Chicken Takeover in the North Market. Guest musicians have included Kim and Stulz’s colleagues, many of them about the same age as the co-founders.
“That was part of our mission in starting VIVO: to get more people excited about classical music,” said Kim, now 32, a native of South Korea who lived in Westerville as an adolescent and now resides in New York City.
Stulz, a native of Upper Arlington, thinks that seven years’ worth of festivals are paying off.
“Each year we keep building and growing,” Stulz, 33, said by email from Moscow during a stop on a tour with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a music group in Paris.
Last year, though, VIVO was, by necessity, reimagined as a virtual event — something the friends did not want to repeat this year.
“Jack and I had a conversation,” Kim said. “We were saying that, no matter what, we want to make sure that the seventh season is not as limited as the sixth was.”
To that end, the seventh edition of the VIVO Music Festival will feature a full complement of in-person events over four days starting Sept. 15. Festivalgoers should consult the festival’s website, www.vivofestival.org, for current coronavirus-related policies.
“The unsaid subtext for this year’s programming is one of celebration and
prayer,” Stulz said. “Music has always served those two functions, but these are the two things we need now more than ever after what we have all been through as a global community this past year.”
Both emotions are sure to be on display during the opening program: “Beer & Beethoven” — set for 7 p.m. Sept. 15 at Strongwater Columbus — will feature the festival’s 14 musicians performing an eclectic repertoire.
“There will be some tango, there will be some jazz, there will be some Beatles,” Kim said.
And there will be drinks for sale, too. “I expect ‘Beer & Beethoven’ to serve
as a kind of prayer through celebration in the great Dionysian tradition of old — filled with drink, laughter and vibrant music,” Stulz said.
Two programs will take place in the Columbus Museum of Art’s Derby Court: “VIVO Beyond,” featuring a Vivo-commissioned world premiere by composer Benjamin Martin, at 7 p.m. Sept 16; and “VIVO Finale,” featuring high-spirited music by Bach, Mendelssohn and Schubert, at 1 p.m. Sept. 19. (In compliance with museum policies, both concerts will require attendees to wear masks.)
In between those programs will come the festival’s most adventuresome —
and pandemic-era appropriate — event: An outdoor performance of John Luther Adams’ percussion piece “Inuksuit” at 1 p.m. Saturday in Schiller Park in German Village.
The festival has assembled 33 percussionists to perform the piece. Audience members should be prepared to mosey through the park, as none of the instrumentalists will be standing still.
“They’re all over the place,” Kim said. “It’s live and it’s ephemeral.”
If VIVO’S artists do their job again this year, Kim hopes that festival-goers will be sufficiently stimulated to explore central Ohio’s other classical music offerings throughout the year.
“VIVO won’t happen for another year, but they will check out the Columbus Symphony, Promusica, Chamber Music Columbus,” Kim said. “There’s so much out there in my great hometown of Columbus.”
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