Sounds of a Summer Night

Notes from six of the best--and smallest--U.S. music festivals

"Tanglewood, who needs it!" snorted Ardys Hepple, senior assistant manager of interim room bookings for Terpsichore Travel ("Always on Our Toes to Serve You"). Hepple was bent on spending her three-week paid vacation in vigorous pursuit of music. "The hills are alive!" she insisted, adding that she intended "to hit six of the best little festivals and fill you guys in." She outfitted her 1950 Nash Rambler (the kind with the reclining seats) for a cross-country haul, cooked up a supply of stew for her husband Algis, who had to stay behind to take care of the cats, and took enough stamps to mail postcards, which are reprinted here.

Marlow, N.H.: Caught up with Monadnock Music on the second floor of the town library. Sat next to a Mrs. Thelma Babbitt from neighboring Hancock, N.H., who whispered, "It's a great asset to hear this quality music without having to go to Boston." The musicians --who are quite accomplished and mostly from Boston--played a Roussel serenade, a Debussy sonata and a Bartok quartet. The festival plays a six-week series of concerts in churches and town halls all over some 650 square miles of the Monadnock region. Kind of a movable feast, you know.

South Worthington, Mass.: The Sevenars Festival, so called because the Schrade family who founded and sustains it all have first names beginning with R, is held in an acoustically perfect auditorium that was once a gymnasium. Even though the Schrades (both Manhattan music teachers) are having festival financial troubles, the spirit is lively and the concerts even more so. Donations are voluntary ($4 suggested), and there's free punch and cookies at the intermission. Heard some Beethoven, Haydn, Rachmaninoff, as well as a kaddish by an Israeli composer named Stutschewsky. Sure would like to stay out the week here, but must move on.

Mount Gretna, Pa.: "Music at Gretna" is held in the old Chautauqua Playhouse, under a dome that rests on 20 cedar trunks. That old dome has had Ives and Bartok bounced off it as well as Chopin and Vivaldi. Run by Carl and Erica Ellenberger (she is a piano teacher; he is a neuro-ophthalmologist), Gretna draws professional musicians who want to play chamber music and sample Erica's wineberry pie. The audiences are kind of short on young people, though. Next year they're going to try more jazz concerts.

Central City, Colo.: Forty miles west of Denver is the Central City Opera, which runs on a yearly budget of over a million (not mine--joke!) and stages very professional productions of operas by everyone from Donizetti to Marschner. No, I don't know who he is, either. I overheard the artistic director, Robert Darling, say that "with our acoustics, we can produce Mozart better than the Met." Well, I don't know, but they did O.K. by Marschner.

Jackson Hole, Wyo.: Paradise! The Grand Teton Music Festival is held in a region that offers white-water rafting, ballooning, fishing and hiking. And on the stage (inside a 65-ft.-high hall that seats 900) they have everything this year from Brahms' Requiem with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (all of them) to Cham-Ber Huang, "the Paganini of the harmonica." The festival director, Ling Tung, says, "Here the audience becomes part of us." I know I must be getting close to California.

Aptos, Calif.: And here I am, 85 miles south of San Francisco, where the Cabrillo Music Festival performs traditional (Scarlatti, Schubert) and modern (Virgil Thomson, John Cage) in any setting they can find, from the Santa Cruz campus to the mission of San Juan Bautista. The festival has to scrape along, but musicians--everyone from Keith Jarrett to Dave Brubeck to some symphony orchestra pros from the Bay Area--are happy to come for free housing and a small per diem. (Smaller even than my daily salary!) The 65 orchestra players in sports shirts look like the folks who wait on you in health-food restaurants. I guess that means it's time to come home. Will Terpsichore Travel pay gas mileage? Love, Ardys.

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