Six Canadian geese gliding along Lake Payette in McCall, Idaho
View from the balcony as the Boise Philharmonic warms up and the audience streams in
The way my eldest of two daughters Kimi puts it, Boise, the capital of Idaho state, is to her what Baguio City has become to our family after we’ve just been to Metro Manila or Los Angeles. It means respite from freeways, from congestion/pollution and from a fast-paced, sometimes toxic, lifestyle.
When her invitation came to spend time with her and my grandchild, both of whom I hadn’t seen in more than two years, in the City of Trees (although this is being contested by Portland, Oregon, ’tis said), I told myself for as long as there are galleries, museums, botanical parks, performing arts, and most of all, a library, I would make the trans-Pacific trip.
Junic posing at the Freak Alley Gallery in downtown Boise
This means flying 13 hours non-stop to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), meeting up with my second daughter and her family, leaving me barely two days to cuddle the younger granddaughter, who has the sniffles, then off again to take connecting flights first to Oakland, CA, and finally to Boise, seen from above with thousands of twinkling lights. My tears fall easily at the thought—my girls live there!
Boise’s charms continue to grow on me every day from the almost cloudless blue sky (bad for the skin, Kimi warns, put on sunblock when you step out of the apartment) to the stray ducks from a nearby river that honk “Good morning!” on some days.
Like Baguio, it has a thriving visual arts community. There are the Idaho State Museum with a gallery set aside for Art Deco-inspired items from clothes to furniture and appliances, the nearby Boise Art Museum (BAM) at 670 Julia Davis Drive and its Sculpture Court with the Jacob Hashimoto site-specific installation “The Fractured Giant.”
Elvira Moulton’s collection of antique china at the Idaho State Museum
The installation is made up of nearly countless kites (20,000, actually) with abstract designs that recall, as the handout reads, “pixels and kaleidoscopes along with fractals in nature, such as snowflakes, raindrops, clouds, and star systems.” It’s a pity that picture-taking is disallowed so I have no stills to show for that visit. But here is a YouTube a link showing the installation of said work.
Credit: Boise Art Museum/YouTube
There are the Idaho State Museum with a gallery set aside for Art Deco-inspired items from clothes to furniture and appliances, and the nearby Boise Art Museum with the Jacob Hashimoto site-specific installation ‘The Fractured Giant’
I imagine how an artist can suffer from a form of mental block, even of depression, and cannot proceed to make one’s usual prints or paintings. Instead, the artist comes out whole from that experience by keeping hands busy. He makes kites from bamboo, string, glue, and paper, he collages, does prints again but primarily draws from his Japanese heritage of kite-making and kite-flying. Hasimoto’s exhibit runs until Jan. 21, 2024.
Inside the heritage site Boise Depot
The other exhibit at BAM’s Galleries 1-5 that ran until June 11 this year was “The Art of Jean LeMarr.” This highlights the works of this Native American artist, educator, feminist. While viewing them, I was reminded of the late Baguio-based multi-media artist Santiago Bose in his appropriation of images and labels for his artworks that also have a pointed message on the white man’s colonization of Filipinos and indigenous peoples, on cultural stereotypes, on the degradation of the environment, on notions of what is beautiful, among other issues.
“They’re Going to Dump It Where?!?,” 1984 work by Jean LaMarr
It is art that disturbs, that is even dark in rendition, that asks uncomfortable questions. It is not there to merely decorate a blank wall.
LaMarr’s show, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art, had pieces with variations on the color purple. Even the 220-page book Jean LaMarr, available at the BAM souvenir shop, has leaves in this feminist color.
Allan L. Edmunds, founder-director of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia, is quoted as saying: “I fondly remember talking with Jean about her ‘Cover Girl series’ and the portrayal of beauty in American historic imagery or movies. By posing Native American females as natural beauties, the artist-feminist sought to disrupt the Marilyn Monroe/Andy Warhol concept. I was impressed by this proud social activist.”
Dr. Debra Harry of the gender, race, and identity program at the University of Nevada in Reno writes: “Her work has that razor-sharp political commentary, yet can transmit the softness and beauty of our cultures, particularly of Indigenous women.”
But to me, the penultimate high point of this visit so far has been “The Sea of Sound: Mahler 5” by the Boise Philharmonic Orchestra under musical director Eric Garcia. While Kimi was driving past Morrison Park en route home, I accidentally happened to see a billboard announcing: “Mahler 5 Morrison Center May 20.” I got agitated from excitement. The Adagietto to the fourth movement of this symphony has been a running theme in my head, my last melody/song syndrome ever since I saw Claudio Abbado conduct the entire symphony in a YouTube video sans score!
Credit: José Manuel/YouTube
The penultimate high point of this visit so far has been ‘The Sea of Sound: Mahler 5’ by the Boise Philharmonic Orchestra under musical director Eric Garcia. The Adagietto to the fourth movement of this symphony has been a running theme in my head
Kimi scored the solo ticket for me. I specified a balcony seat so I could see the entire orchestra. I counted the days until May 20 and shared the news with Manila concert organizer Joseph C. Uy who answered me instantly: “Oh my God, Tita, I envy you. It has been more than 30 years since I heard this beautiful masterpiece performed and how I yearn to hear it again before I embark on the afterlife which, I believe, will be impossible. Tita, listen to the adagietto. Please be aware that I think it’s the saddest music ever written, with a feeling of hopelessness, and yet the feeling of God is there in the beautiful music. That’s why Mahler is my favorite symphony composer.”
Adding to the excitement was the pre-concert talk before the 7:30 p.m. performance, featuring musicologist Bradley Berg and music director Garcia. Berg described Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor as “a journey from darkness to light” that is 70 minutes long. They spoke in an accessible language without being too erudite or highfalutin.
Berg called Mahler “a star conductor” of operas before he became a famous composer, “an incredible conductor with an outgoing style,” working six days a week, leading orchestras in operas that lasted from three to four hours. Before long, this stressful life led to a severe stomach bleeding when he thought he would die. But he survived the incident.
In the summer after this ailment, Mahler, a part-time composer, wrote the Fifth Symphony that opens with a funeral march, a solo trumpet that was familiar to the Austrian audience during that time, a motif so reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth. This motif sets off the orchestra on its on journey from darkness to light.
Berg pointed out that what Mahler did was to highlight the different sections of the orchestra. Garcia agreed that almost every instrument finds its own dynamic level, adding that it isn’t until 55 pages after that one hears the entire orchestra playing together again.
Garcia considers Mahler “the most childlike of composers even as sophisticated as he was.” He ended with the hope that the performance “will bring something powerful in your life.”
And it has, Maestro Garcia, it has—I have been privileged to listen to the Adagietto played live, its swooning melody with a special orchestration for strings and harp. Yes, Joseph is right. It gives a glimpse of heaven just as in Mahler’s time, the Adagietto served as his love letter to his new wife, his fellow composer Alma.
(Leonard Bernstein conducting the Adagietto part of Mahler’s 5th Symphony)
Credit: Adagietto/YouTube
Garcia set aside his baton during this entire movement as though he wanted only his arms and hands, in their eloquent strokes, to draw out the most heart-stirring sounds from the strings and harp.
After the last note was struck for the Rondo or Finale, the audience leapt to its feet, almost as one, while cries of “Bravo!”, whistles and cheers echoing through the rafters of the hall. Garcia made two curtain calls before he and the orchestra called it a night. My eyeglasses were fogged up from unshed tears.
Outside it is past 9 p.m., but the sky still looked dusky during this brief transition between spring and summer. Kimi awaited me outside the theater, and I got rooted again to realities of which I have no power to control: the G7 countries supporting Ukraine against Russia, the elections in Thailand, the power struggle within the Philippine House of Representatives, and so on.
Once again, that handy Auerbach quote: “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
Downtown Boise in the background in this three-generation photo. Inscribed on the bench are Donna Beth Richmond’s words: “The mountains are good for my soul.”
