Music: Opera Under Canvas

Summer music festivals usually meander through the hot weather months peacefully masticating a cud of predigested opera and alfalfa-flavored chamber music. A notable and daring exception has been New York’s Empire State Music Festival, which five years ago pledged itself to new or rarely performed works. In a sprawling tent at Ellenville, N.Y., the festival presented the Eastern premiere of Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum, the premiere of a ballet by Villa-Lottos, Sibelius’ music for The Tempest and Strauss’s Elektra, Carl Orff’s score for Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the festival was dogged by bad luck and bad weather, last summer had to close up shop in midseason. This summer, operating from a new site, it has come back stronger than ever. Last week, with the first Eastern performance of Handel’s Semele and a performance of Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral (TIME, March 17, 1958), it had the look and the ebullient sound of the healthiest summer festival in the land.

The Empire State Music Festival owes much of its vigor to Minnesota-born Impresario Frank Forest, 54. Forest studied agricultural engineering at the University of Minnesota, later helped found a profitable pharmaceutical firm (White Laboratories of Kenilworth, N.J.), gave up business to follow a lifelong interest in singing. He spent twelve years performing leading tenor roles in opera houses all over Europe, also appeared in a number of films (Champagne Waltz, I’ll Take Romance with Grace Moore). In 1955 he started pouring his energies and money into the creation of the Empire State Festival.

Forest wanted to avoid the operas that the Metropolitan or New York City operas present, and to concentrate instead on “brand-new works or very, very old ones.” He hired young singing talent, backed it up with topflight coaches and conductors, among them, Eduard van Reinum, Leopold Stokowski, Igor Markevitch. Although the festival, summer after summer, earned more than its share of critical huzzahs, it attracted only moderate crowds, had to be abandoned altogether last summer, when the festival tent was wrecked in a tearing summer squall during the American premiere of Murder in the Cathedral.

This year’s festival was newly located in an aqua, gold and navy tent (capacity 2,000) near Bear Mountain, only an hour’s drive from Manhattan. From season’s start the tent was jammed to capacity, and the programs included such stimulating fare as a full-stage production of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and a production of Stravinsky’s stately Oedipus Rex, conducted by Stokowski. Impresario Forest, who still clips profitable pharmaceutical coupons, thinks that in another summer or so the festival will pay its own way. Meantime, he is angling for a new audience: the passengers on incoming foreign liners, who will be briefed on the festival’s offerings before the boat touches the pier.