As musical terms go, "andante" is pretty well known. Italian for "walking," andante is not about style but about speed, or rather lack thereof. It's a walking pace, moving right along, but not so fast that you miss the little things, like those tiny, blooming ground covers pedestrians delight in.It's that season, here in the Northwest, when andante is just the right speed. There's a show along every neighborhood sidewalk: purple-tipped vines creep over concrete, plump baby cactus stars crowd the cracks in walls and everywhere the eager morning glory unrolls powerful new lassoes. Nobody's in a hurry, out on those walks. For background music, double choirs of robins and their contemporaries trade refrains. They remind me of how important such walks have been to the music I love.GREAT MUSIC OUTDOORSMahler, Brahms, Dvorak: These three gentlemen of the late 19th-century wrote some of the music that shows up most often in listener requests on stations like KING FM. Deeply inspired by their own walks in the woods of Eastern Europe, they sometimes literally quote bird melodies in symphonies and chamber music. More often, though, the natural environment infuses the sweep and breeze of the musical mood. The great outdoors and great music get together each summer in the Pacific Northwest at festivals a short drive or a ferry ride away. For a quarter-century, the Olympic Music Festival, in a century-old barn near Quilcene on the Olympic Peninsula, has shared its donkeys and chickens with Mozart and Beethoven to the delight of Northwest-casual fans. The focus may be as much on the trip itself as on the beauties of the music. Since they play on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the same concert twice, a Seattle trip to that festival could include a varied weekend, or just a day spent in the leisurely round-trip. You can listen indoors - that's inside the barn doors, sitting on some hay - or outdoors on the lawn, lunch and lemonade at the ready. And as you drive out and drive home, there's that summery classical weekend sound on the radio.Seattle Chamber Music Society encourages listeners to make the most of long evenings outdoors, with no charge for sitting on the lawn and enjoying what ticketholders are getting a view of indoors at the Overlake School in Redmond during the first two weeks in August. A Northwest focus on music in the summer wouldn't be complete without at least a vicarious visit to these concerts. Vicarious concertgoing is a specialty of old-fashioned radio, and no stranger to our contemporary music environment. You're invited to tune in for live concerts from Overlake through Aug. 15 (a continuation of the Monday/Wednesday/Friday evenings we shared from the Seattle side of the lake at the Chamber Music Society's July concerts) on 98.1 KING FM. We're also sharing concert recordings from that barn out on the Peninsula every Tuesday and Thursday evening through September, and from the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, too. MUSICAL MIRRORSClassics are whatever sounds listeners return to again and again. Thank goodness that even we keep the old, familiar ones, composers keep writing and tomorrow's great music is blossoming. We walk through the summer's bouquet, listening. As the eternal artistic spirit keeps calling for - to borrow Shakespeare's expression - mirrors to be held up to nature, we delight in the musical mirrors of our uniquely human, uniquely summertime, natures. Gigi Yellen is host of "Northwest Focus" on 98.1 KING-FM.[[In-content Ad]]
