Christian Reif praised by the Minnesota Star Tribune for his 2026 Lakes Area Music Festival season
Review: Lakes Area Music Festival gets the passion going
By Rob Hubbard The Minnesota Star Tribune
When the lights go down at a Lakes Area Music Festival (LAMF) concert, loon calls summon your attention before the customary land acknowledgement and reminder about silencing cell phones.
It’s part of the brand for LAMF’s month of classical concerts, performed by professional orchestral musicians from throughout North America. They converge upon the state’s Brainerd Lakes region, a place long dependent upon cabin life for its economic well-being.
Now in its 18th year, the festival has become one more very good reason to head to the forested center of the state each August, with Sunday’s opening concert at Brainerd’s Gichi-Ziibi Center for the Arts, near the banks of the Mississippi, a prime example of what makes it worth the drive.
Presenting music composed by a small circle of 19th-century friends — Johannes Brahms and his champions, Robert and Clara Schumann — it proved a fine forum for the showmanship and interpretive prowess of their fellow German, conductor Christian Reif. Lakes Area’s music director also displayed his ability to establish chemistry with a fairly freshly assembled orchestra.
“Passion” is the theme of this summer’s festival, the headline attraction being an Aug. 14 and 16 production of Georges Bizet’s opera, “Carmen,” featuring Reif’s Grammy-winning wife, soprano Julia Bullock, in the title role. (She and Reif shared that 2024 Grammy, for he was both collaborative pianist and conductor on her “Walking in the Dark” album.) And there was plenty of passionate music on tap Sunday.
The Schumanns provided the most inspiring moments, as the curtain-raising set of five of Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances” emphasized flamboyance at the expense of accuracy, the rapid shifts in tempo and tone a bit loose around the edges.
But all was expertly played from that point forward, with considerably more care paid to the other two works. Piano soloist Adam Golka made a convincing case that Clara Schumann’s lone Piano Concerto deserves a more prominent place in the classical canon. Bearing flavors of florid romanticism reminiscent of the concertos of Edvard Grieg and Peter Tchaikovsky, it’s a fascinating blend of theatricality and introspection.
It bears remembering that, during their lifetimes, Clara was more famous than her husband, as she was a star of the piano while his career as a composer and conductor was hampered by bouts with severe mental illness. Sunday’s performance strongly suggested that her compositional skills deserve more attention.
Golka’s interpretation was most memorable during an ultra-romantic second movement duet with cellist Coleman Itzkoff, engulfing the audience in a wistful sadness before Golka took them to a fiery finale full of spectacularly executed fast passages. A well-deserved standing ovation led to an encore, a delicately fluid Frederic Chopin étude.
Yet the showcase for the orchestra was Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony. Under Reif’s gracefully detailed direction, the ensemble brought forth the sense of striving in a work that sounds like a brilliant, troubled artist’s determined quest to find joy. Most impressive were the rapid-fire staccato passages of the Scherzo, although the moving melancholy of the slow movement (sparked by Henry Ward’s mournful oboe) and the exuberant finale were equally inspiring. It showed Reif at his charismatic best, imploring the orchestra to infuse the music with as much passion as possible.
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