Music: In Tanglewood’s Tent

In Massachusetts’ green and social Berkshire hills, a pioneer landowner in 1849 was William Aspinwall Tappan, Boston merchant and banker. He purchased 210 acres between Lenox and Stockbridge, called it “Tanglewood,” built a Victorian mansion on it. He also built a small red cottage which he rented to Author Nathaniel Hawthorne. There Hawthorne wrote his Tanglewood Tales for children and began his The House of the Seven Gables. Nothing very important had since happened at sedate Tanglewood until last week. From the nearby Berkshire Hunt and Country Club, where he and his wife had been put up in the best suite, Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony drove over to Tanglewood, noted with approval that a tan tent, 280 ft. by 120 ft. and 60 ft. high at its peak, had been raised on the property. Dr. Koussevitzky entered the tent, commanded that two sticks be clicked together before the big plywood orchestra shell. Listening judiciously from the rear of the tent, Conductor Koussevitzky heard the distinct click, beamed, pronounced: “Fine! Fine! Very good!” Next evening as the sun dropped behind the green hills, Conductor Koussevitzky stood on the podium in un-summery white tie and tail coat, tapped his baton, raised his arms for the portentous opening of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3.

Thus began the fourth annual Berkshire Symphonic Festival, which in its first two years was nothing more pretentious than a few concerts by New York Philharmonic Symphony men under oldtime Conductor Henry Hadley on the Hanna Farm at Lenox. Last summer, on an estate near Stockbridge, three concerts by the Boston Symphony under Dr. Kaussevitzky netted $1,800, caused organizers of the Festival to begin to talk of “an American Salzburg” and impelled the stately Boston maestro to urge that the number of summer concerts be increased and the Festival obtain a permanent home. Result was that the present owners of Tanglewood, Mrs. Gorham Brooks and Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan of Brookline, turned their estate over to the Festival committee, which raised $16,000 in pledges for an orchestra pavilion to be designed by famed Finnish-born Architect Eliel Saarinen.

Last week at the first of six Berkshire concerts to be given during the fortnight, the audience of 5,500—near capacity of the temporary tent—was as impeccable and polite as any in Symphony Hall or Carnegie Hall, included such folk as Violinists Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Jacques Gordon, Mrs. E. Parmalee (Alta Rockefeller) Prentice, Dancer Ted Shawn, Mrs. Alvan T. Fuller (wife of Massachusetts’ onetime Governor), U. S. Ambassador-at-large Norman Hezekiah Davis, Novelist Owen Johnson, Mrs. Edward S. Harkness and many another social column name. Most of them sat in boxes which were shrewdly placed in a double row in the middle of the tent so that their occupants could be thoroughly seen.

That the Festival’s opening turnout was notable, that advance ticket sales came within $10,000 of liquidating a $40,000 budget, was largely the accomplishment of the committee’s energetic head, Miss Gertrude Robinson Smith. Daughter of Corporation Lawyer Charles Robinson Smith, Miss Smith is in her 50s, lives near Stockbridge. She got local people to work as ushers for nothing, persuaded the Thursday Morning Club of Great Barrington to operate a food concession cooperatively with the Festival management. Spreading word of the Festival among Eastern socialites, Miss Smith also labored to make concertgoers of plain Berkshire folk who would never see the inside of a city concert hall.

Staple Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, salted sparingly with Sibelius and Ravel, was the Berkshire Festival’s fare, with the promise that soloists or opera may be served up later if the U. S. Salzburg comes into its own. But music critics who, summer after summer, have faithfully reported mediocre U. S. hot-weather performances, found cause for enthusiasm last week in the Tanglewood tent. Dr.Koussevitzky’s men had never played indoors with more sonority or vitality. And when real lightning flashed during the storm music in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (Pastoral), most of the audience felt that it was no more than an able performance deserved.