Each year the Moab Music Festival hosts several Colorado River Benefit Concerts. In 2008 these fund-raising events will be on the afternoons of Thursday, September 3, Thursday September 10, and Monday September 14.
When patrons of Moab Music Festival’s Colorado Benefit Concerts step off their motorized launches after an exhilarating journey down the river, they see only a forest of tamarisk. They are 30 miles downstream of Moab, having passed under Dead Horse Point and the even more famous cliff where Thelma and Louise met their final onscreen fate. Guests have probably seen flights of blue heron, and, if they are lucky, a brown bear loping along the riverside.
They have arrived for an afternoon that the New York Times has called “an event that combines human and natural grandeur.”
After a short walk down a path through tangled vegetation the grotto emerges. “I love the look on people’s faces when they first see it,” says Michael Barrett, the Festival’s Music Director. “No photograph does the grotto justice because it is more than color, shape and size. It has an enveloping spiritual dimension that only can be experienced in the place itself. This is the wilderness, carved and maintained by Nature.”
The Sounds of Silence
Michael likes to tell the story of performing John Cages’s 4’ 33” (Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds) in the grotto. Often thought of as an all too ironic avant-garde work, the piece is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence – in three movements. In any normal concert hall, street noise, a rumbling subway or a distant siren is likely to fill what seems like a void. But in the grotto, the silence was lush. It wasn’t an absence of sound by a richly textured presence of silence.
“I asked the audience to take part in the performance, to be the chorus,” Michael relates. “I lowered the piano key cover at the end of the first movement, raised it again at the end of the second movement, and closed it at the final. It was a stunning artistic experience that none of us will ever forget.”
The Richness of Music
When music interrupts the natural silence of the grotto, the sounds are crisp and golden at the same time. Gene Pack, who spent forty years as a beloved broadcaster hosting classical music on public radio, described an all Bach concert in the Grotto as “the peak musical experience of my life”. The program included two Brandenberg Concertos as well as mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performance of Cantata Ich Habe Genug (“I have enough”).
“The music of that afternoon still rings in my ears,” says Barrett.
When Nature Joins In
Sometimes Natures joins in the performance. Jamie Bernstein Thomas related on her radio show from Tanglewood the extraordinary afternoon when Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was performed on two pianos in the grotto. (Yes, two grand pianos had been transported downriver for the day).
The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) caused a scandal when it was introduced in Paris in 1913 as a ballet choreographed by Nijinsky. It evokes the lives of an ancient tribal people and, in particular, the spring sacrifice of a virgin who dances herself to death. The music is wild, primitive and pagan.
The first part comes to a brilliant crashing end. As Ken Noda and Michael Barrett lifted their hands from the pianos, back from the river came an echoing response, deeper and longer than anyone recalls before or since. Michael looked down to see drops of blood on his piano keys (he had cut his finger, in the intense playing) as a raven swooped into the grotto, perched itself on a rock, and loudly proclaimed that it would stay for the rest of the piece. Indeed, it proceeded to caw an accompaniment as the performance resumed.
Each year offers unique special moments in the grotto to Festival patrons who choose to take part in these special benefits. Many will recall the concert two days after September 11, 2001 when the music had special elements of both violence and deep sorrow. Others will recall not only the music but the convivial post-concert wine receptions where artists and patrons mingle and talk about their unique shared experience of music in Nature’s special concert hall.
The Festival’s critical partner for the Colorado River Concert is Tag-A-Long Expeditions of Moab, whose founder and President Bob Jones brought the river grotto venue to the attention of the Festival back in the early 1990’s.
Jones’ staff and the operations crew of the Festival, led by Rex Holman, spend the morning of each concert day ferrying down to the grotto all the musicians, the instruments, music stands, food and refreshments, catering equipment, and, of course, sanitary facilities. Then come the patrons. And when it is all over, everything must come back up river and the concert site left absolutely clean. This is a wilderness area – only Nature, not man, should change it.
The Voyage of the Grand Piano
Often, the greatest challenge of the River Concert is the ferrying of a grand piano (or even two!). Legs removed and wrapped in moving blankets and straps, the piano is slid carefully up a gangway and strapped on its side into a motorized boat. It makes quite a sight as it slowly floats past red rock canyon walls, meandering around sand bars – and occasionally beaching on one of them. Once the piano arrives, the most delicate – and back-breaking – work begins. Each year the height of the river and the shape of the bank are different. Setting the gangway and securely unloading the piano is a unique challenge. Even the placement of the piano in the grotto is new every summer. Each year’s spring floods leave a different floor in the grotto. A wooden stage is put down and leveled. Only then can the piano tuner – Miriam Graham, who is also a Ranger at Arches National Park – do her job.
The Patrons’ Experience
Patrons of the Benefit Concerts gather at noon. Buses take them for a 30 minute ride to the “put in” site downriver at Potash. The drive takes them past scenic cliffs that are favorite sites for wall climbers (called “Wall Street”), past arches and petroglyphs, down to the boat ramp from which rafters head to the Colorado’s famed Cataract Canyon, the largest whitewater rapid in North America. The motorized boat trip from Potash to the grotto concert site takes about 45 minutes on flat water which flows through a varied landscape of towering red mountains, slickrock, cliffs with variegated sandstone layers and underneath famous Dead Horse Point. From beneath the covers that shelter them from the sun (or, sometimes the rain) passengers can also gaze up at the cliff, from which Thelma and Louise’s car flew off into the Colorado.
Arriving at the landing, patrons are helped down a gangway and take a short walk to the grotto where comfortable seating is provided. Many people choose to climb to one of the ledges of the grotto, sitting on the rocks or using blankets or pillows they have brought. The concert begins shortly and includes an intermission.
A wine and hors d’oeuvres reception follows the music, allowing patrons and musicians to mingle and talk. Boats are loaded up at regular intervals and patrons return to the Potash landing and bus back to Moab. By this time, the sun is lower in the sky, changing the color and even the shape of the landscape. | 
