Festivals: Sounds of a Summer Night

A craving for music seems to possess the U.S. in the summertime. From coast to coast, Americans brave torrential downpours, smoggy traffic jams, cement seats, grass stains and mosquitoes to get within the sound of music. They seek it out in bosky glens and canopied pavilions, up on mountaintops and down in gulches, in abandoned cow pastures and deserted mining towns, on a riverbank beside a barge and in the middle of a city zoo.

Part rite and part romp, the summer music festival attests the ever-widening U.S. interest in the arts. The quality of performance varies from aspiring and disciplined musicianship to the routine drudging of bored hacks. The classics sometimes share the scene with jazz and folk singing, often done with verve and style. There is even a hot-weather blend of classical and popular that might be dubbed popsical music. Herewith, a sampling of some distinctive U.S. festivals:

∙THE SANTA FE OPERA (June 26-Aug. 24) commands a magnificent site in the foothills of New Mexico’s dramatic Sangre de Cristo mountain range. When General Director John Crosby, 36, began the venture in 1957, his Eastern friends told him he was dizzy from the altitude. The skeptics now trek west to see his dizzying success. The present season will see polished performances ranging from Don Giovanni and Madame Butterfly to Honegger’s Joan of Arc, combined with a flair for the new. In the much-anticipated American premiere of the late Alban Berg’s unfinished, powerful and grittily atonal opera Lulu, Soprano Joan Carroll will sing the dissolute heroine.

Local pride runs so high that Santa Fe citizens account for 70% of the annual ticket sale, and the touristas, as Santa Feans call outlanders, buy the rest. Local taste is also sensitive. A lady once had a cocktail thrown at her at a party for suggesting that the tenor ought to practice more.

∙BERKSHIRE FESTIVAL (July 5-Aug. 25) evokes the shade of the late great Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the initial summer concerts of the Boston Symphony, and of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who once lived in a little red cottage on the edge of the 210-acre estate called Tanglewood. Wrote Hawthorne: “There is a glen between this house and the lake through which winds a little brook with pools, and tiny waterfalls over the great roots of trees . . . Beyond the lake is Monument Mountain, looking like a headless sphinx wrapped in a Persian shawl, when clad in the rich and diversified autumnal foliage of its woods.” To the lush beauty of nature, Tanglewood added the spare beauty of modern architecture in 1938 with the 6,037-capacity Music Shed. This is Conductor Erich Leinsdorfs first season in the Shed, and he made his opening-week debut both bold and orthodox by performing a clutch of Mozart concertos and divertimenti never before played at Tanglewood. Says Leinsdorf: “There is nothing wrong in playing Kismet or Rosemarie for a while, but when it becomes a MUST, a forced alternative to digging into the late Beethoven quartets, then we have a big problem.”

Bostonian rectitude may account for the absence of any seasonal letdown in the quality of the Boston Symphony. What makes Tanglewood a model festival is that the orchestra’s tone and attack are kept as finely manicured as the grounds.

∙MARLBORO FESTIVAL (July 12-Sept. 2) in Vermont is really a sort of busman’s holiday for fine musicians. None of the 85 or so instrumentalists are paid; instead, most contribute $625 apiece to meet expenses. Free from concert pressures, the musicians split up into informal chamber music groups and play precisely what they please. The knowledgeable public that attends the weekend concerts does not always know exactly what work will be played, but does know that it will be performed with love, zest, and craftsmanlike precision. There is no cult of personality at Marlboro despite the musical giants on the premises. Pianist Rudolf Serkin, who has also been playing at Tanglewood this season, is artistic director of the chamber music workshop. Pablo Casals is conducting master classes on the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites and Gamba Sonatas and public performances of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony (the “Italian” Symphony) and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

∙CENTRAL CITY OPERA FESTIVAL (June 29-July 27). Back in its 19th century heyday, when gold and silver were being dug out of its mountains, Central City, Colo., was the roaring capital of “The Little Kingdom of Gilpin.” Its lusty miners built a splendid stone opera house and imported their music along with beans, bacon, and mining tools. But in time the gold went out of the Golden West and Central City became a near ghost town. Then 32 years ago, the old opera house was restored.

What Central City has found is that it can combine good opera with tourist-drawing memorabilia of the Old West and graft on a few colorful traditions of its own. Ushers in long coats and high boots ring bells up and down Eureka Street announcing the opera performances like town criers. Opening day saw square dances in front of the opera house, and a surrey with the fringe on top conveyed dignitaries to the ceremonies. The nostalgically inclined can bucket out to deserted mines in Jeeps, watch a pony-express ride, or stare at The Face on the Barroom Floor, a new face commissioned to please the tourists who, in turn, prefer to believe that it is the 19th century original. Despite the diverting hoopla, some 27,000 opera lovers are buying seats this season to hear those authentic old Western masters Mozart (Don Giovanni) and Verdi (Il Trovatore).

∙THE AMERICAN WIND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (June 5-Aug. 11) is the showboat of summer music. Its unlikely home: a 122-ft.-long, 30-ft.-wide converted coal barge. A tug tows this floating concert hall along the Ohio, Mississippi and tributary rivers. In the next fortnight, the A.W.S. will dock at and serenade such symphony-less cities as

Paducah, Ky. (July 30, 31) and Stillwater, Minn. (Aug. 11).The barge has been christened Point Counterpoint, and its showmanly musical skipper is Massachusetts-born, Juilliard-educated Robert Austin Boudreau, 36. Boudreau’s orchestra is almost as unorthodox as its setting. It consists entirely of wind instruments (e.g., oboes, trumpets, French horns), percussion, and harp. Since orchestral music of this sort is a rarity, Boudreau has persistently commissioned and played new works. This gives his orchestra an astringently modern tone, but he tempers it with crowd pleasers like the My Fair Lady score.

Every member of the A.W.S. is under 30. Boudreau wants to excite the musical imagination of children by giving them a closeup of professionals at work. Last week he downed gangplank at Point Pleasant, W. Va., and the youngsters swarmed aboard and watched in wide-eyed bliss as orchestra members demonstrated their instruments.

∙JACOB’S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL (June 25-Sept. 1) is Biblically named after a round, imposing rock that still rests on the grounds of this once abandoned Lee, Mass., Colonial farm. Dancer-Founder Ted Shawn, 71, recalls that 50 people attended the first performance in a rustic barn-studio, and 45 of them were friends of F. Cowles Strickland, who inspired Shawn with the idea of starting what would become the leading U.S. dance festival. For this year’s 70-performance season, an audience of 25,000 is expected. In the early days, Jacob’s Pillow was a somewhat spartan and impromptu affair. There were no dressing rooms, and dancers sometimes had to make costume changes in the nearby bushes. Nowadays, a deceptively barnlike facade encloses a comfortable modern theater that seats 630; it is one of some 30 buildings occupied by students as well as performers.

Two dance groups are making their U.S. debuts: England’s Western Theatre Ballet, a young, fresh-minded troupe that experiments with psychological dance drama, comedy and jazz as well as purely classic styles, and stars and soloists of the Paris Opera, who include Juan Guiliano, the versatile dancer of the now extinct Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.

∙CINCINNATI’S SUMMER OPERA FESTIVAL (June 19-July 21) is as casual and unpretentious as two of its most popular intermission refreshments—beer and popcorn. The unique setting may have something to do with it; the hilltop opera pavilion is located at the city zoo. “It isn’t often you see grand opera next to the monkeys,” says the opera association’s president, John Magro. The animals make their presence and their preferences known. The ducks on the large lake directly behind the pavilion are partial to the death scene in Travia’a and last season quacked right along with Soprano Mary Curtis-Verna all through it. The lions were so fond of roaring along with the sopranos that the lion house had to be moved to another part of the zoo. Despite the comic relief, the “Zoo Opera” is a fairly venerable institution—it was founded in 1920.

Met singers Licia Albanese, Barry Morell, and Frank Guarrera have been on hand for the current season, which opened with Tosca and closed with Rigoletto. One of this year’s highlights: a sellout performance of Cavalleria Rusticana by four Italian opera singers from Milan in honor of Composer Pietro Mascagni’s 100th anniversary.

∙LEWISOHN STADIUM (June 25-Aug. 10) summer concerts, originally conceived as a form of recreation for World War I servicemen, quickly expanded to give all of New York’s worn, huddled and hectic masses a tension-free oasis where they could drink in the cultural delight and pellucid serenity of music. Since its inception in 1918, the Lewisohn concert series has fulfilled that function with zeal and occasional distinction. Of late, the masses seem to be flocking to the concrete-tiered stadium with somewhat less enthusiasm, and several topflight performers (Rubinstein, Isaac Stern and others) now shun it. For one thing, these and other artists are loath to face the New York critics under less than ideal conditions (too little rehearsal time, bad weather, bad acoustics). Concerts have dwindled from 65 in 1939 to 24 in 1962, attendance from 375,500 in 1939 to 194,500 in 1962, while the cost of the cheapest tickets has gone up from 250 to 750. Outstanding musical personalities have drawn remarkable crowds: Pinza (27,500), Belafonte (25,000), Joan Sutherland (over 20,000). No one expects Van Cliburn’s 1963 opening-night figure of 14,000 to be topped this season. The concerts run an annual deficit of $80,000 to $100,000, but that is a minor problem as long as Lewisohn’s spiritual and financial godmother, Minnie Guggenheimer, taps her who’s-who list of rich, civic-minded New Yorkers.

∙RAVINIA (June 27-Aug. 11), on the outskirts of Chicago, operates on the theory that variety is the spice of musical life. Pablo Casals conducting his own oratorio El Pesebre has been followed by Folk Songsters Peter, Paul and Mary conducting 13,934 folkniks into collective rapture. One night jazz holds court, with Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald; another night the classical reigns, as that 20th century master Igor Stravinsky conducts his own Petrouchka suite, the Two Little Suites and Scherzo a La Russe. To add the final touch of diversity, the New York City Ballet will appear Aug. 6-11, performing two of George Balanchine’s latest ballets. The greatest U.S. prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief, has just rejoined the company. ∙ASPEN (June 26-Aug. 25) is the headiest of the festivals. To begin with, it is 7,900 ft. above sea level amid Colorado’s breathtaking Rocky Mountain scenery. The nine-week music festival runs in tandem with the skull-stretching

Institute for Humanistic Studies, where one may attend two-hour discussions on Aristotle’s Ethics or Herman Kahn’s thermonuclear theories. The music is just as uncompromising. A typical program may consist of a Bach suite, a Mozart piano concerto, and a trio of demanding modern works by Darius Milhaud, conducted by the arthritically crippled composer from his wheelchair. All 40 of the visiting artists also teach, and among those present besides Milhaud this season are Met Opera Star Eleanor Steber and the renowned teacher of Van Cliburn, Rosina Lhevinne. By encouraging the festivaliant to start the day with a brisk half-hour hike up the Roaring Fork or Castle Creek for a couple of hours of trout fishing in crystalline, pine-shaded streams, Aspen fosters one of the great classic ideals: Mens sana in corpore sano.