On Thursday morning we drove up into the Berkshires for a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 at the famous Berkshire Choral Festival. This American musical institution, now in its 30th year, brings singers from around the world to study and rehearse great choral works (and some minor ones as well) for a week and then perform them with the Springfield (Mass.) Symphony Orchestra. It's a kind of summer music camp for adults, with the singers paying handsome fees to live in dormitories and work and play in a beautiful natural environment. For some of the works - such as the Monteverdi Vespers that pose special musical difficulties - the singers also have to pass an audition as well as being able to pay! The setting is very
beautiful, the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass. Reached by a narrow, winding rural road, the spacious campus of largely traditional looking academic building, huge green spaces, and playing fields, is surrounded by deep forests and mountains. I don't know much about this school, but I do know that hockey is very big. The most prominent building on the campus is a huge domed hockey stadium. This building is divided into two sections: a professional hockey rink with bleachers, media facilities, hung with the requisite flags of all Sheffield's New England prep school opponents, and an equally large, but unfinished space capable of seating, I would guess, at least eight hundred people on movable chairs and risers. This is where the Festival has its rehearsals and performances. This was not an acoustically dead space, but it had surprisingly little warmth and reverberation. The festival brings in renowned conductors for each week's program (the previous week Julian Wachner from Trinity Church for Elijah), and the Monteverdi was conducted by one of New York's most celebrated conductors, Kent Tritle. Kent has been for the past 22 years the Director of Music and Organist at the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on Park Avenue, and currently he conducts almost every major concert chorus in the city as well as choral activities at the Manhattan School of Music - this in addition to an active career as a virtuoso concert organist. Next month he will become the Organist and Director of Music at the Cathedral Church of Stint John the Divine in NYC. As a conductor he has complete technical control of all musical details, an unfailing sense of how to get the confidence and best efforts of all musicians, and a graceful and precise conducting style that brings it all into being in the moment. He is also an enormously warm and engaging person who, after one week appeared to have a personal relationship with each of the 160 amateur singers in the chorus. The festival also brings in professional soloists (5 for this piece) chosen by the conductors for each week's masterwork, and that's why we were there. Molly was the soprano soloist for this performance of the Monteverdi, a work in which she has specialized and often performed. Vespers was a controversial choice since most amateur performers as well as listeners prefer the better known and more easily accessible romantic scale works such as the Brahms, Verdi, Berlioz requiems, Elijah, and so forth. So they had fewer campers that week (especially with the weeding out auditions), but even so the chorus was still very large for this work (160 singers) together with an orchestra scaled down to accommodate the instrumental requirements of Monteverdi's music. I've never heard a performance of the Vespers quite like this: huge choir (usually you hear one or two singers on a part), an orchestra playing modern instruments, and a non-reverberant room that had nothing in common with San Marco. But it was a great performance because Tritle had taken those singers seriously, was unfailingly demanding, and made them want to perform in a musical idiom that was a major aesthetic and technical stretch for most of them. Similarly for the orchestra, who knocked themselves out to make their modern instruments do things they didn't ordinarily do. The soloists were excellent and Molly was brilliant. She has a similar personality to Kent's, so although she had only been there for 2 1/2 days, they were all crowding around her and having their picture taken. The performance itself was, apparently, the surprise hit of the season with a prolonged, resounding standing ovation.
We also had a little family reunion over the weekend at the home of Peggy's sister Patty and her husband Bob in Lee, Mass. All four of the sisters were there (including Jane who flew up from Chapel Hill) plus three of the husbands, and two of Patty's grown children and five grandchildren. It was a lot of fun and terrific for everybody to gather for Molly's performance.
I had one other quasi-musical experience on this little trip. A wonderful little town, Great Barrington, Mass. lies about midway between Sheffield and Lee. I had been through it once several years ago but didn't have time to stop. The interesting thing about this little town is that its beautiful, un-New England looking Congregational Church has one of the finest and largest surviving 19th century American organs. The church, which is not large (although quite tall), has this monumental organ installed in the rear gallery. Built by Hilborne Roosevelt in 1883, this three-manual organ was considerably larger than the Kleuker at the C of C, and the unique and technologically advanced aspects of its action, winding system (originally water operated so efficiently that the builder advertised that "not one drop of water was wasted). All the details about this organ are preserved in the literature and, apparently, the organ gives a
brilliant effect in the building. The case was designed by the prominent organ architect (who literally wrote the book on organ design), George W. Audsley. The main doors of the church were locked, but I wandered around to the back and followed a sign that read "Church Office" into the cellar. Nasty, dank air was, apparently not a new problem since the winding system was elaborately constructed such that no "cellar air" was taken into the organ, even though the blowers were located in the cellar. No one around, although lights were on, office doors open, some kind of telephone message loop with the minister's voice kept playing. We went up into the church, but couldn't get into the organ, sad to say. But it gave a magnificent visual effect. I noticed from a message board in the cellar that the minister was called "Pastor Van," so I'm sure he would have let me into the organ had he been available!
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