Coast Live Music fun, lively and festive

Coast Live’s second calendar year season of four public concerts concluded on Thursday, Oct. 2, with a special event at the Thomas Fogarty Winery up on Skyline Boulevard. The 90-minute concert featured a wind octet which its leader and emcee, oboist James Austin Smith, informally dubbed “The Blowers.” This is what the late violinist Geoff Nuttall — husband of Coast Live artistic director Livia Sohn — called all wind players.

This grouping — two each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn — was a standard wind ensemble in the late 18th century. Compositions for it are known as “harmoniemusik.” W.A. Mozart wrote two serenades of this kind. The concert began with the first of these, K. 375 in E-flat major. In the small wood-lined hall of the winery’s event center, with spectacular views out the windows over the Bay while the sun remained up, the sound was bright, loud and energetic, offering flare without blare.

The players, all of them chamber music specialists, dug into the music with gusto, giving it all the Mozartean charm available. The lead solos in this piece go mostly to the first clarinet, played here by Alan R. Kay. But there are plenty of solos for the other instruments and all could be heard clearly. Even the bassoons, mostly rummaging around at the bottom, could be easily made out making responsive remarks to the clarinet tags.

Harmoniemusik remains a viable compositional tool today. To demonstrate this, the Blowers continued with the Andante movement from the 1983 Wind Octet by Ruth Gipps. A British pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gipps is one of the modern female composers like America’s Florence Price who are now emerging from undeserved obscurity. Her music is tonal but distinctively modern. The Andante is built on a repeating motif, played with solos rising gently out of the mass of the total ensemble.

The main historical use of harmoniemusik, Smith told the audience, was as instrumental condensations of operas to take on tour to publicize the full work. These arrangements are easily portable but convey the power of the full version. The concert concluded with such a condensation of Bedrich Smetana’s 1860s opera “The Bartered Bride,” in a spicy arrangement by the contemporary German oboist and composer Andreas N. Tarkmann.

Here the bassoons — played by Gina Cuffari and Eleni Katz — got plenty of bold solos and duets as did everybody else. Smith’s narration explaining the plot of the opera was divided into chunks before each excerpt. It was passed around the ensemble so everyone had a chance to read amusing lines like, “This all becomes confusing, strange and convoluted, so they decide to sing about it.” This was as much fun as the lively and vivid music.

Admission for this concert was unusually expensive for a brief chamber music event. But besides the delightful music making, spectacular acoustics and gorgeous views of the Bay, the ticket included a preceding reception with Fogarty wines and a buffet of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres ranging from a cheese and fruit plate to scrumptious skewers of salmon and bell peppers. A shuttle bus from central Portola Valley served attendees who didn’t care to drive up to Skyline.

Coast Live begins its 2026 season on Feb. 7, with oboist Smith joining the brilliant award-winning Viano String Quartet in a concert at Portola Valley Town Center in a program including works of Beethoven and Arnold Bax.