By Elmer Ploetz

You could call it a love story. 

Charles Haupt loved music. He loved it so much, in fact, that when he retired from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, where he was concertmaster for over 35 years, that he wasn’t ready to stop playing. 

Instead, along with his wife, Irene, Charles Haupt founded A Musical Feast, an event intended to bridge the gap between new music and older forms and to bring musicians together. The music was able to go on. 

Until this past August, when Charles Haupt died on Aug. 18, 2024, at age 85 after a long illness. So that makes this year’s A Musical Feast both a celebration and a memorial. The program will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 2, 2024) at Canisius College’s Montante Cultural Center.

An official memorial to Charles Haupt will take place at the Burchfield Penney Art Center on Nov. 17 at 1 p.m., but A Musical Feast serves as a memorial in its own right. 

A Musical Feast was a team effort. Charles was the creative force behind the series, but Irene was the organizer, pulling things together to make it happen.

“After he retired from the orchestra, he still wanted to be connected with music,” Irene Haupt said in a recent interview.  “And I wanted him to be connected with music, and he still wanted to play. And so he played quite a lot with A Musical Feast. And I’m very happy that he was connected to music up to his death,  because music was extraordinarily important to him.”

Haupt breathed music

How important? Charles Haupt lived it and breathed it. Irene Haupt said that when she visited him in New York City when he was concertmaster and soloist for the Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, “It was  sleeping, rehearsing, eating and a concert. I mean, I’ve never seen a man work as much.  … And when he couldn’t sometimes play because of his shoulder,  the doctor would come in and give him shots in his shoulder so he could play. It’s truly a different kind of a life.”

A Musical Feast started out in 2006 on the stage at Kavinoky Theatre, which Irene Haupt said she has come to truly appreciate. 

“ The musicians played on stage inside whatever playethey had on their stage set,” she said. “It could be in the living room of some English manor in the countryside. … There was one play when it was World War II. They played in a field from World War Two. In retrospect, it was really pretty interesting, really cool.”

In 2009, A Music Feast accepted an invitation to move to the Burchfield Penney, where both Charles and Irene Haupt have had works exhibited. There it continued until the Pandemic. 

Montante Center new home

Now it is at the Montante Center at Canisius College. This year’s program is titled “The Two Sides of Sax” and will include performances featuring saxophonists Sander Beumer, Wildy Zumwalt and Elliot Scozzaro; pianists Hans van Ham and George Caldwell; and bassist Stephen Parisi.

Beumer and van Ham are musicians visiting from the Utrecht Conservatoire in the Netherlands. They perform together as Duo Beumer van Ham. They are also in the area to record with Zumwalt in Fredonia. 

“While they are in Fredonia, we thought,  ‘play with us in in Buffalo!’” said Haupt. “But I wanted to have just one half traditional and the other half to be jazz.” 

The way the program will roll out is the first half will present a collection of pieces frmo the “classical” side of the saxophone. Featured will be:

FIRST SET

• “Romanze, op. 85” (1911) by Max Bruch
  Sander Beumer, alto saxophone; Hans van Ham, piano
• “A set of six” (2023) by Lowell Dykstra
  Wildy Zumwalt, alto saxophone; Sander Beumer, alto saxophone; Hans van Ham, piano
• “Rendering 50” (2023) by Gijs van Dijk
  Sander Beumer, alto saxophone; Wildy Zumwalt, alto saxophone; Hans van Ham, piano
• “Danse du Satyr” (1936) by Freda Swain
  Wildy Zumwalt, alto saxophone; Hans van Ham, piano
• “Jephthah” (1958) by Carl Anton Wirth
  Wildy Zumwalt,  saxophone; Sander Beumer,  saxophone; Hans van Ham, piano

INTERMISSION

• “Dialogues for Two Alto Saxophones”  (2024) by Rob Deemer
  Wildy Zumwalt, alto saxophone; Elliot Scozzaro, alto saxophone;  
• “Bolivia” by Cedar Walton
• “Once Forgotten” by Pamela Baskin-Watson
• “Mean to Me” by Fred Ahlert &  Roy Turk
• “New York” by Donald Brown
  Elliot Scozzaro, alto saxophone; George Caldwell, piano; Stephen Parisi Jr.,bass

The program has a strong SUNY Fredonia presence, from Zumwalt and Scozzaro (who teach in the music program) to a composition by Fredonia professor Rob Deemer. 

There is also a piece, “Danse du Satyr,” a new discovery from the SUNY Fredonia Sigurd Rascher Archive. 

Future Feasts?

A Musical Feast is 18 years old this year, but if or how the series will continue is a question. Irene Haupt said putting on the concerts has become more difficult post-pandemic. And the Haupts have also insisted on paying musicians reasonable amounts. 

“People have no idea how much money you have to spend for a concert because they think, ‘Oh, musicians, you know, how much money would they get?’ I just don’t think that’s fair.”

A Musical Feast has always functioned with a fiscal sponsor instead of getting  501(c)(3) charitable status, which has also hurt its ability to raise funds. 

But this year, the Haupts have created two concerts (the first was on Sept. 7). The show has gone on and whatever the future brings, the series will always be a labor of love.

Tickets are available at https://www.canisius.edu/events/two-sides-sax or at the door

Elmer Ploetz is editor-in-chief of The Buffalo Hive.