We all have our own individual concept of heaven on earth – a tropical island, perhaps, or a château on the Loire, Tokyo in blossom season, a permanent seat at Wigmore Hall, a daily table at Disfrutar – but in August I think I got a glimpse of mine. It’s in Montana and combines music, awe-inspiring landscapes, great food and wonderful company. It’s called Tippet Rise.

Its creators are a couple called Cathy and Peter Halstead and, unlike a new, highly visible breed of wealthy US-based individuals, they don’t feel the need to spend their money on ego-massaging space travel, or submarine trips to the ocean’s floor, or buying social media platforms from which to sow division. No, the Halsteads live to support the arts and provide the ideal space in which the exponents of those art forms can thrive – true philanthropy in action. They’re artists themselves – he’s a poet and novelist with a wonderfully sinuous use of language, she’s an abstract painter whose use of colour simply radiates joy.

Tippet Rise is their gift to their fellow humans and it has a distinct magic of its own. Styled an arts center, it occupies 12,500 acres of central Montana (for comparison, the island of Manhattan covers 14,600 acres.) It is, in fact, a working ranch – cattle roam the site and graze its vast open spaces. When I suggest to the Halsteads that they have created something magical, they admit that ‘We have! But perhaps inadvertently … we were always talking about it when we were kids – we’ve known each other since we were 16 – and we’d say, “Well, we’ll have our art center and we’re going to do it this way”. Back then we didn’t realise that wasn’t a joke, that we actually were going to do it.’ And do it they have, and to the highest standard imaginable.

A Sunday morning song programme by the mezzo Ema Nikolovska and pianist Kunal Lahiry, playing the 1890s ‘Seraphina’ Steinway (photo: Kevin Kinzley)

Ringed by distant mountains, the ranch is home to a striking array of very large sculptures – it’s the kind of terrain that lends itself to grand gesture and offers astounding panoramas that lead the eye towards, say, Mark di Suvero’s 65-feet Proverb of 2002, one of three pieces by the sculptor at Tippet Rise (his Beethoven’s Quartet, of 2003 – inspired by the composer’s Op 132 – features a suspended polished metal plate that can be struck, sending gong-like sounds over the hillsides). Ai Weiwei’s 2013 Iron Tree is just that, a tree made up of 97 different iron pieces, locked together, and Richard Serra’s Crossroads II, recently relocated from an urban setting to a perfectly chosen prow of volcanic rock overlooking a valley, demands reflection on space, time and, perhaps, man’s place within nature. There are three powerful works by the Spanish Ensamble Studio. One, Domo (2016), also functions as a performance space. With its organic feel and very natural curves it looks as if it has grown out of the grass creating a huge mushroom-like structure that blends perfectly with the landscape.

Tippet Rise, though, is more than its sculptures, or indeed its terrain: for five consecutive late-summer weekends it plays host to a wonderfully conceived series of concerts, put together by the Center’s Artistic Advisor, the pianist Pedja Mužijević, which take place in a variety of settings on the ranch. The epicentre of the musical activity is the Olivier Music Barn, a beautiful 35 by 55 foot, 120-seat concert hall that is the perfect setting for a piano or chamber recital. Designed by the architect Laura Viklund with acoustics engineered by a team from Arup led by Raj Patel, the Olivier Barn draws its inspiration from some illustrious antecedents, the Haydnsaal at the Esterházy Palace in Hungary that witnessed the premieres of numerous string quartets by Joseph Haydn, and the Snape Maltings – whose latest renovation Arup oversaw – which has a ceiling (housing a long reverberant acoustic canopy) that plays such an important role in that hall’s distinctive sound. Arup were also involved in a recent acoustic tweak to London’s Wigmore Hall and the ‘Halo’, a ledge that runs round that hall, makes an appearance in the Olivier Barn too. Built on a cement floor to give a clean, firm bass sound, the entire barn is made of larch, a wood celebrated for its sympathetic acoustic properties. It really is a jewel box. Stephen Hough, one of the first pianists to play in the Barn, has written that ‘To play at Tippet Rise is to be reminded that the earth was making music before human beings learned their scales. The performer shares the wings with singing birds; the soundproofing, like the roof, is only required to exclude a storm; and beyond the stage, through the sky-lit eye of a vast window, the landscape dances in more complex rhythms than could be imagined by even the most sophisticated artist.’ And, yes, that huge window behind the performer – very unusual in a concert hall – creates an extraordinary perspective with the occasional distant passer-by adding a strangely moving narrative to the music-making happening in the foreground.

The Domo, by the Spanish Ensamble Studio, where sculpture, land art and performance space merge

The Olivier Barn also houses a very impressive studio to control the audio and video recordings made there. It’s one of two studios at Tippet Rise – a brand-new unit has just been finished that allows for Dolby Atmos monitoring and mastering, and like everything on the ranch, it is done to the highest specification.

For piano buffs and pianists alike, Tippet Rise might be considered something of a Mecca. The Olivier Barn alone houses three magnificent Steinways: one, dating from 1941 was once owned by Vladimir Horowitz and then by Eugene Istomin (who recorded Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto on it for CBS in 1956 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy), another, the ‘Seraphina’, was made in 1897 and a third, a Hamburg instrument, has that wonderful German pedigree and sounds glorious. In a truly tragic stroke of fate, Tippet Rise’s piano man, Michael Toia – someone whose artistry blurred the boundaries between technician and magician, according to Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (one of this year’s performers) – was killed in a car accident just a week after I left. He clearly possessed a very special talent and, from a very brief encounter with him, he was a delightful man.

I heard three concerts in the Olivier Barn, and each pianist chose a different instrument. Bavouzet opted for the Horowitz-Istomin Steinway for a programme of Ravel, ahead of re-recording the complete piano works for Chandos (Valses nobles et sentimentales, Gaspard de la nuit and Le Tombeau de Couperin were the advertised works, and the little waltz À la manière de Borodine and Jeux d’eau were thrown in as apéritif and digestif, inimitably introduced by Bavouzet whose Gallic charm hit the bull’s eye for the Montanan audience). Yevgeny Sudbin, the following day and playing on the Hamburg Steinway, went for an intense programme of music by some of the greatest pianist-composers (Liszt’s Funérailles, Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse, Scriabin’s Tenth Piano Sonata, Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre – in a Horowitz-Sudbin transcription – and then, joined by his daughter Bella, Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker). It was a reminder of Sudbin’s pedigree as a superb representative of a virtuoso tradition, and his choice of piano again delivered sonic marvels.

The third pianist to appear during my weekend at Tippet Rise was Kunal Lahiry, who partnered the mezzo Ema Nikolovska (both artists are BBC New Generation alumni). Nikolovska’s big, perfectly produced voice tested the acoustics of the Olivier Barn, and the programme singer and pianist had chosen was cleverly constructed, combining Copland’s settings of Emily Dickinson, Prokofiev vocalises and Schubert songs with a few lone contributions by Messiaen, Crumb (his laugh-out-loud ‘The bee’), Emily Doolittle and the US premiere of a cycle written for these artists by Nahre Sol, Apperceptive Algorithms. Playing the 1897 ‘Seraphina’, Lahiry was a sensitive partner to Nikolovska’s vivid performances – her stage presence is totally engaging and she’s a consummate singing-actor. Both musicians introduced the four sets of songs with warmth and charm. (Lahiry and Nikolovska are giving the same programme at Wigmore Hall on January 4 – catch it if you can. You won’t be disappointed.)

Cellist Arlen Hlusko between Peter and Cathy Halstead in The Geode (photo: Kevin Kinzley)

A new performance space was inaugurated this year – The Geode – a striking ‘acoustical structure’ by Arup, again overseen by Raj Patel, and comprising four triangular ‘shells’, one for the performer(s), and three for the audience. The cellist Arlen Hlusko – another charismatic musician – gave the first concert in the space and it was extraordinary; the sound was so powerful and focused that many of us wondered whether any amplification was involved. But no – the positioning of the shell she sat under, the materials used and the relationship between the three other shells produced an amazingly rich sound. (When I spoke to her afterwards she told me she had no perception of how it sounded as she received none of the projected waves herself.) After much research into where best to place them (for sun, wind, snow and even nesting snakes!), the steel frames for the four different-sized shells were anchored in the ground. As Patel explained, ‘the wood is Douglas Fir on both sides. It’s very thick, partly to preserve the bass sound because if timber is too thin – or not rigidly enough fixed – it will absorb low-frequency sound. So the thickness was driven by that and the structural weight that we needed. The inner Douglas Fir was then treated using the Japanese yakisugi method. The wood is burnt first, then they use a wire brush basically to brush off a layer. Then it’s burnt again, and again. And the ridging that causes is very important because if the timber is too flat, we would have got very strong reflections and they’ll sound quite harsh at the high frequencies in most instruments. So the idea was to create some roughness to diffuse those and just take the edge off the sound at the upper register.’

The result was very impressive and Hlusko’s programme was well chosen to show off The Geode’s acoustic magic. Her programme ranged down the centuries from Domenico Gabrielli and Bach to the present day – in fact, ‘day’, is le mot juste as she gave the first performance of a piece by the Native American composer and cellist Dawn Avery, Àkweks Katyes (‘The Eagle Flies’), commissioned by Tippet Rise. Introducing it, Avery paid tribute to the Crow tribe (autonym: Apsáalooke) whose ancestral land we were standing on, and the combination of setting, the deeply moving music and the amazing sound of the solo cello in The Geode provided a memory that will linger long.

If Montana seems a rather far-flung destination (though tourism accounts for a sizeable source of income for the State), the state-of-the-art studios at Tippet Rise allow most of the performances to be streamed on its website and on YouTube. Check it out and sample a little of the magic yourself!

Visit tippetrise.org to explore the archive

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