From Every Mountainside

"Let's start a music festival!" is a cocktail-party phrase that carries some of the same heady excitement that "Let's start a magazine!" did a generation ago. In 1953, Jascha Rushkin, a violinist with Toscanini's NBC Symphony, whispered the words into the ear of Metropolitan Opera Baritone John Brownlee. In time, facts were added: 1) some three-quarter million people visit New York's Catskill Mountains every summer; 2) a Catskills civic association pledged to buy $100,000 worth of tickets for a five-week festival; 3) the former NBC Symphony, now famed as the Symphony of the Air, had time on its hands.

That was enough for Brownlee. Last June he moved his family to Ellenville, N.Y. (pop. 5,000), enlisted the aid of a hotel owner and a tenor-turned-businessman. By last week 110 acres had been converted into festival grounds containing a 4,000-seat amphitheater, a stage that could be adapted for concerts or theater-in-the-round, and floodlights etching the surrounding trees--hemlock, white pine, maple and cherry. The Empire State Music Festival was ready for business. The opening concert (Beethoven and Brahms) was conducted by Holland's standout Eduard van Beinum; the next night a U.S. conductor, Emerson Buckley, led a setless but fresh-sounding La Boheme. Planned later this season: Shakespeare's Tempest, with the rarely heard incidental music by Jean Sibelius. Wrote the New York Times's Howard Taubman: "The Berkshires have a major festival [at Tangle-wood]. Now the Catskills. Every mountain range may stand benevolently over one in due time."

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