Mendocino Music Festival marks 30 years
Thirty years on, it’s still thrilling “to be in a wild place and be able to do art,” says pianist Susan Waterfall, co-founder of the classically backboned but notably eclectic music festival that unfolds every July on the spectacular Mendocino coast.
The veteran Bay Area musician and concert creator started the Mendocino Music Festival in 1987 with her husband, Allan Pollack, a saxophone-playing orchestral conductor who leads the festival orchestra and chorus as well as the jazz big band, and the late Walter Green.
“Nature is winning up here,” says the pianist, who prefers the rugged North Coast, where the festival is in the midst of a 30-year celebration featuring an international mix of classical pianists and violinists, bluegrass, Celtic and soul bands, opera singers (performing Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” Friday, July 15), Buckwheat Zydeco, Malawian rock bandleader Peter Mawanga, and Brazilian guitarist-singer Badi Assad.
Waterfall (that’s her real name, and she didn’t much appreciate others kids saying, “Here comes Niagara”) delighted audiences a few years back with her Bach-and-beer lectures and narrated concerts.
On Wednesday, July 20, the rising young Santa Rosa-reared violinist David McCarroll plays Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the festival orchestra, which will also perform the composer’s lofty “Eroica” Symphony.
“Most people have some experience with Beethoven, but when you pull it all together and see the whole range of the music, you’re in awe of what a human being can accomplish and of what music can describe and express,” Waterfall says.
The festival’s eclectic lineup has made it more challenging to market, but it works for Mendocino and the people who flock there for the music and scenery this time of year.
“It’s so much fun to hear these different kinds of music in relation to each other,” says Waterfall, whose son, jazz piano whiz and producer Julian Waterfall Pollack, attended his first Mendocino festival when he was barely a year old and who first performed there at age 10.
Veteran film programmer Elliot Lavine has cooked up another dark humdinger with the 2016 installment of his “I Wake Up Dreaming” film noir series, which runs at the Castro Theatre from Aug. 3-31.