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A Midsummer Night's Mendelssohn
| Article
# : |
19519 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,165 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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One by one, musicians amble down the steep hillside toward the big white tent that has been erected on the meadow. The vast fabric structure, large enough to contain a stage platform and a thousand seats, seems only tentatively anchored to the ground. You feel any minute the whole thing might gather its tethers and soar aloft into the hazy dusk.
Shouts and greetings pepper the air. The musicians come from Boston, New York, Cleveland, and other places. They wear backpacks and carry instrument cases and hoist small children to their shoulders for a first look at the tent. Upon the stage platform at the far end of the tent the codirector of the Bard College Mendelssohn Festival, Leon Botstein (who is also president of Board) confers with his codirector, Sarah Rothenberg. He looks up anxiously at the small fans suspended overhead. They are supposed to keep the bugs away from the players.
"The stage gets hot," confides Marina Sturm, clarinetist, as she walks by and mounts the step to the platform. Indeed, the heat is still oppressive. The round moon floats sulkily toward its zenith. Botstein raises an arm for silence and announces the rehearsal will begin with Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer's Night's Dream. The four graceful chords soar into the darkling twilight, blending with the cicadas and the occasional rumbles of distant thunder.
A pause. A quick conference about a missing flute score. It is found. Botstein looks across the orchestra again and smiles. "You know," he declares, "this is going to be wonderful."
And it was.
The Mendelssohn Festival was held August 16-25 on the tiny campus of Bard College, located in the picturesque Hudson River Valley, just a hundred miles north of New York City. Bard's annual event is in only its second year, but already it has gained worldwide attention. Critics, scholars, performers, and enthusiasts alike hailed last year's inaugural festival, devoted to Johannes Brahms, as a welcome alternative to the bigger, more impersonal summer festivals. "Our agenda each year is to find a central figure who is known enough for people to be interested and yet unfamiliar enough to enable us all to make some discoveries," explains Rothenberg, who, like Botstein, is both a performer and a faculty member at Bard. "Then we place the composer in his or her historical and cultural contexts, bring together audiences with scholars and performers, and establish a sense of community that's unfortunately gotten
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