Art and music blend in the wild of Montana
FISHTAIL, MONT.— Well, there is a bar, a post office, a general store. That pretty nearly sums up Fishtail, Mont.
Oh, yes, nearby, against the backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains, there is also a 4,152-hectare ranch whose rolling hillscape accommodates cattle, sheep, outdoor sculpture by the likes of Alexander Calder and Patrick Dougherty, and a summer chamber music festival of a quality worthy of Toronto or even New York.
As the late comedian Anna Russell used to say in her hilariously accurate description of the plot of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
In a sense, though, Tippet Rise Art Center is almost made up, originally no more than a figment of the imagination of a pair of American philanthropists, Cathy and Peter Halstead, looking for a place where they could bring together art, music and nature in a near-magical setting.
They looked in California, in Colorado and in Hawaii before finally, a two-hour drive from Yellowstone National Park, they discovered a place where, putting together 12 parcels of land, they could realize their dream, an oversized oasis in the middle of nowhere where sculpture could nestle in gentle canyons and world-class music could be heard in a barnlike, 150-seat concert hall inspired by The Maltings, Snape, home of England’s Aldeburgh Festival.
It all came together last summer, with the news even reaching southern Ontario, where a jaded music columnist suddenly decided he hadn’t heard and seen everything after all.
And so, last weekend, he flew to Billings, rode over 100-odd kilometres of paved and gravel road to Tippet Rise (named after Cathy Halstead’s nickname for her mother), to behold the magic.
It began as his taxi bounced over the winding gravel road with the appearance in the far distance of what looked like a giant metal bird and turned out to be Two Discs, 1965, a Calder sculpture on loan from Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
It was only the first of a series of outdoor pieces to be seen, sited at considerable distance from each other across the art centre’s sprawling acreage, another being Mark di Suvero’s Beethoven Quartet, 2003, and perhaps the most striking, Ensamble Studio’s Domo, 2016, an enveloping cavern shaped from tons of site-installed reinforced concrete, beneath whose roof he heard a morning concert of Schubert featuring the American pianist Jeffrey Kahane and Israel’s Ariel String Quartet.
The other weekend concerts took place in the Olivier Music Barn, whose picture window behind the concert platform enables the audience to peer past the musicians into a seemingly limitless landscape. Cathy Halstead happens to be an artist, her husband Peter a pianist (they have known each other since the age of 16) and, as native New Englanders, they grew up influenced by the Transcendentalism of Whitman and Thoreau with an almost mystical reverence for the land.
To secure the future of their dream, they have set up a foundation that now owns the land and its nature-friendly architecture. Tippet Rise is virtually self-sustaining, without the presence of fossil fuels or kindred pollutants.
Although visitors to the outdoor sculptures have a larger range of times available to them, the summer concerts take place on nine weekends, ending Sept. 16, with tickets a mere $10 (U.S.) each. It is probably the biggest bargain in chamber music.
But then, Tippet Rise is an exercise in idealism rather than commerce. Artists, including this summer the Israeli cellist Matt Haimovitz (who teaches in Montreal at McGill University), the British pianist Stephen Hough and Canada’s St. Lawrence String Quartet, seem to come for the experience rather than the money.
And they can take advantage of a state-of-the-art recording studio while in residence. This summer, Pentatone released Domo, a compact disc recorded at last year’s inaugural summer program.
To meet the Halsteads is to be introduced to a grey-haired couple, married 36 years, who retain an almost childlike wonder at the natural world and our place in it. They belong to that remarkable group of people identifiable as American originals.
And Tippet Rise is surely an original achievement, never intended to be a big city kind of mass experience but a place, intimate within its vastness, where art and life are one.