www.montereycountyweekly.com september 7-13, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 small, intimate performance. Chairs of various design, carried in from all over the house, fill the usually mostly-empty living room with high ceilings. Each seat is topped with a program, made available only at this moment; those who attend the house concerts do so without knowing in advance what will be performed. This afternoon Wu is performing too, but mainly she is the director, the one who chooses the material, recruits the musicians, rehearses with them and makes sure they get paid—as well as providing them with a stage in her own living room. At a previous house concert, Korean-American harpist Ko Ni Choi could be heard plucking all 47 strings of what Wu described to her audience as “the most difficult of instruments.” On this afternoon, the program is all about various fiddle traditions. Wu wears an ethereal golden dress, and keeps her favorite yellow towel between her neck and her instrument, a 2021 Samuel Zygmuntowicz violin made just for her. Her face is expressive, matching the joy, the sadness, the drama of the music. She is accompanied by violinist Sam Weiser, violinist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Evan Kahn, and they appear to be having as much fun as the audience. There’s no conductor, so the playful communication between those four makes for a wonderful theater; Wu brings lightness and humor to everything she does. The program varies, from works by French turn-of-the-20th-century harpist Henriette Renié to Pacific Grovebased composer Carleton Macy. It’s the audience that returns. Wu describes the house concert audience members as ranging in age, from 6 to 90, and “sparkly-eyed, tearyeyed, taking everything in.” They are “professors, students, ministers, engineers, designers, realtors, landscapers, business owners, daughters, moms, husbands, grandfathers.” They may be seen in larger concert halls attending classical music concerts on more classic stages, or they may not. It’s all part of Wu’s vision of democratizing the experience of hearing live chamber music. She’s thinking about shaking up the world of Monterey County music, and she already has, starting in her own home. ~ After the concert, the double doors to the garden open and the garden party starts. Now you can chat with the musicians and have a glass of wine, while looking toward the mountains, enjoying so much space open for the eye. Now it’s time for questions and answers, and the hostess—all smiles— moves from one group to another. When Wu chose Corral de Tierra as her home, it was done with the understanding that the house must be suitable not only for violin practice, but also for private concerts. “A lot of musicians can’t afford homes with beautiful rooms,” she says. “And there are so many stories of composers who have a home space where they shared music with the people they wanted to share it with. It’s a lost art.” Since she moved to Monterey County in 2020, Wu has already organized three seasons of private concerts, inviting friends and new neighbors first. She calls the initiative Sunkiss’d Mozart. “Our central value is investment in artists,” she says, speaking in the plural on account of her husband, Goodfellow, who is her volunteering right hand in the project, and also on behalf of the current nonprofit sponsor of those private events, New Asia Chamber Music Society. Wu believes that providing the best working conditions for artists will result in the best performance and the most transformative audience experience, adding that over 90 percent of the donations that Sunkiss’d Mozart takes in go directly to performing artists. That might not sound subversive, but at least as much as changing up programming and the venue for classic music, the premise of paying more to musicians is out of step with the status quo in the industry. “Because musicians should also be people that deserve to join the human race of having children, owning a Wu plays her violin outside of her house. She is wearing a handmade dress, a gift from her husband, Ryan Goodfellow, who co-organizes home concerts. Wu’s living room during an April 8, 2023 house concert. The harpist is Ko Ni Choi. The program included works by French harpist Bernard Andrès and Russian composer Valeri Kikta.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==