Maverick Concert Series Program Guide 2011

MAVERICK concert festival 1916 - 2 011

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We Are Proud To Support the Maverick Concerts Helen Bader David Gubits Marilyn Janow Edward Leavitt Kathy McFarland Lawrence Posner Susan Rizwani David F. Segal Sondra Siegel Jane Velez Willetta Warberg Paul Washington Laurie Ylvisaker

Table of Contents 2

Board of Directors 2011 Summer Schedule

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The Maverick Festival: A Brief History

4 - 5

A Message from the Music Director

6 - 9

Betty Ballantine Remembers

10 - 11

A Child of the Maverick

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Restoration of the Hall

Contributors:

Writers: Mary Fairchild, Alexander Platt, Betty Ballantine, Robin Raymond & Cornelia Rosenblum Editor: David F. Segal Graphic Design & Production: Katie Jellinghaus

Characters & Credits:

All Historical Maverick Festival photos courtesy of the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz.

Cover: • Earnest Brace, Florence Cramer, Reeves Brace, Konrad Cramer, Helen Walters, Eugenie Gershoy, Harry Gottlieb & Margie Barnes.

• Arnold Blanch, Lucile Blanch, Dorothy Wilson & Floyd Wilson, 1922 • Matilde Jellinghaus Post, Cyril Butler, L. Carl Jellinghaus, Mary Batlin, Unknown, Bill Sewell, Unknown, Charles Rosen. Sitting; Marian Brown Sewell & Miggy Butler Jellinghaus • Lucile Blanch, Kay Rosen, Polly Rosen, & Konrad Cramer, 1930 • Standing Silhouette: Hervey White • Cello & Maverick Horse Inset: Simon Russell Inside cover: • The Audience for Salammbo with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, 1925 • Russell Wright’s Decoration for A Cubist Circus, 1923 Photo Credits this page: Renee Samuels, Burt Weinstein & Dion Ogust 1

Board of Directors

2011 Summer Schedule JUNE Sat. | 25 | 8 pm Actors & Writers Theatre

Simon Russell

Sun. | 26 | 4 pm Tokyo String Quartet, with Samuel Quintal, viola

CHAIR Susan Rizwani

VICE-CHAIR David F. Segal

TREASURER Kathy McFarland

SECRETARY Dr. Ed Leavitt

Helen Bader David Gubits Marilyn Janow Lawrence Posner Sondra Siegel Jane Velez Willetta Warberg Paul F. Washington CHAIR EMERITA Cornelia Rosenblum

JULY Sun | 3 | 4 pm Miró Quartet Sun. | 3 | 8 pm Actors & Writers Theatre

Sat. | 6 | 8 pm Jazz: Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio Sun. | 7 | 4 pm Jon Nakamatsu, piano Sat. | 13 | 8 pm Bill Charlap, jazz piano

Sat. | 9 | 11 am Young People’s Concert Jason Vieaux, guitar

Sun. | 14 | 3 pm Justin Kolb, piano 4 pm: Amernet String Quartet, with Justin Kolb, piano

Sat. | 9 | 8 pm Jason Vieaux, guitar

Sat. | 20 | 8 pm Uri Caine, jazz piano

Sun. | 10 | 4 pm St. Petersburg String Quartet, with Peter Kolkay, bassoon

Sun. | 21 | 4 pm Concert for the Friends of Maverick Zuill Bailey, cello, with Navah Perlman, piano

Sat. | 16 | 11 am Young People’s Concert Trio Solisti Sat. | 16 | 8 pm ETHEL String Quartet Sun. | 17 | 3 pm Pre-Concert Lecture/Demonstration by composer Bright Sheng with Trio Solisti 4 pm Trio Solisti Sat. | 23 | 8 pm Perry Beekman, vocals & guitar; Bar Scott & Terry Blaine, vocals

Sat. | 27 | 6 pm Nancy Allen Lundy, soprano; Philip Cutlip, baritone; Babette Hierholzer, piano Sun. | 28 | 4 pm Shanghai Quartet, with Joel Fan, piano SEPTEMBER Fri. | 2 | 8 pm Ilya Yakushev, piano

Sat. | 30 | 11 am Young People’s Concert Andrew Russo & Frederic Chiu, piano duo

Sat. | 3 | 6 pm Maverick Chamber Players Alexander Platt, conductor Stephen Gosling, piano; Maria Jette & Nancy Allen Lundy, sopranos; Mary Nessinger, mezzo-soprano; Robert Mack, tenor; Kerry Henderson, baritone; Robert Osborne, bass

Sun. | 31 | 4 pm Andrew Russo & Frederic Chiu, piano duo

Sun. | 4 | 4 pm Daedalus String Quartet, with Andrew Garland, baritone

Sun. | 24 | 4 pm Leipzig String Quartet

Simon Russell

AUGUST Sat. | 6 | 11 am Young People’s Concert Elizabeth Mitchell & Family

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The Maverick Festival A brief history

by Mary Fairchild

musical had to have the European hallmark,” he said. “Woodstock was a beginning for many young American musicians…. There were few other such opportunities elsewhere in the country.”

Gently encouraged by Hervey White, first-chair symphonists and established soloists began coming to Woodstock.

“The Maverick” was the collective description for the colony of unabashed artists that flourished at the edge of Woodstock’s artistic main drag from 1905 until about 1944: the term was both pejorative and affectionate. The Maverick Festival was an annual bacchanal conceived—by Hervey White, founder and artistic elemental of The Maverick—as a Bohemian carnival to be held on the Colony’s grounds under the August full moon.

Hervey described that first season: ”Last Sunday nearly four hundred people, including several farm wives and two millionaires, heard Beethoven, Arensky, Debussy, and Chopin.”

The idea of a music season to be held conjointly with the general Festival shenanigans dates from 1915, when Hervey had the idea of holding classical music performances as a way of raising money. (This seems an extraordinary notion today, when we fight for every penny of support.) The initial purpose was to pay for a well to be dug, but the festival and concerts were such a success that the whole undertaking became the main fund-raising vehicle for building projects, taxes, and other operating expenses for the Colony. In 1929 the New York Herald Tribune reported 6,000 people in attendance, all misbehaving to a greater or lesser degree.

In 1924, Hervey commissioned John Flannagan, a brilliantly talented, iconoclastic, and penniless sculptor, to carve the iconic Maverick horse. Using an ax as the major tool, the entire monumental statue was carved from the trunk of a chestnut tree in only a few days.

“Hervey had a way of getting things done,” according to Mr. Barzin. And Hervey’s vision redounds to our felicity. His music chapel still stands at the foot of a wooded rise, improved here and there, buttressed, trussed, reroofed. Artists don’t spend the whole summer here, but rather swoop in for a day or a weekend.

The resident spirits are perhaps more Bach than bacchante, but appreciative audiences still express their delight by stamping their feet on the tympanum of the old wooden floor. Allan Updegraff observed in 1916, “Inside, the afternoon twilight, let in by the mass of windows… was softened by ivory-tinted walls. Big uprights of unbarked logs paneled the room, and… supporting log frameworks sprang, with a Gothic suggestion, to the high, curved, unpainted pine roof. Green light from the woods outside winked everywhere through the chinks of the single-thickness walls.”

When Hervey White got serious about his idea of ongoing music in the summer woodland, he had in mind “chamber music in a rustic music chapel, among tall trees at the foot of a hill… I secured a farm, with a proper hill and tall trees, and a farmhouse that would do to live in until I could build something better; but I needed food, a music hall, and musicians.” This was according to Allan Updegraff, novelist of Woodstock, who went on to say, in that year of 1916, that Hervey’s music chapel, except for the “fifty six-paned windows in the front gable, and the prolongation of the roof along one side to form a huge porch, … resembled nothing so much as a sizeable new barn.” Leon Barzin, founder, conductor, and music director of the National Orchestral Association and the original music director of the New York City Ballet, worked on the hall when he was 16 or 17, according to an article he wrote in 1975, and the project was completed entirely by volunteers, without the intervention of an architect or paid laborers.

Some things haven’t changed a bit. A summer thunderstorm gets your attention and ups the ante for a string quartet. A moth startles with its flutter. Birdsong fills the caesurae between movements, the non-silence invoked by John Cage in 4’33”, four-and-a-half minutes (and a bit) that premiered at Maverick in 1952.

In the early days of music at the Maverick, the regular season for orchestral musicians was more like an academic calendar: 32 weeks, with four months of the year open to the questionable pleasures of unemployment. Mr. Barzin wrote that in the early years of the 20th century, there was an insidious prejudice in serious musical circles against American musicians. “Everything

I wonder what became of Hervey’s well.

Acknowledgements: Leon Barzin, Allan Updegraff, Cornelia Rosenblum, all at www.maverickconcerts.org. The Jean Lasher Gaede and Elizabeth “Fritzi” Striebel Archive, courtesy of the Center for Photography at Woodstock.

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Renee Samuels

A Message from the Music Director:

Jennifer Girard

Alexander Platt

Welcome to the 96th season of Maverick Concerts, the oldest summer chamber music festival in America, nestled in the forest just outside of Woodstock, New York. Since its very first performances in our celebrated, handhewn concert hall in 1916 and going back even further to the founding of the Maverick Art Colony in 1905, the Maverick Concerts have been part of the very ethos of Woodstock, celebrating its central values of artistic freedom, rustic simplicity and the eternal quest of mind and spirit. We were here long before Woodstock became Woodstock and, joyfully, “The Maverick” labors on, providing music-lovers of all stripes with summer after summer of delightfully eclectic weekends, celebrating the whole world of music while steadily anchoring ourselves in the Classical tradition. I hope you’ll join us as we once again blend the old with the new, the familiar with the forgotten, ever doing so in a uniquely Woodstock style that continues our treasured traditions.

The Maverick Concerts 2011 The Virtuoso Composer: Bernstein, Mahler, Liszt As classical music in our time, bruised and battered by the world economic crisis and a larger decline in taste, seems to ever more see itself under threat, we must keep in mind the spirits of Hervey White and the founders of the Maverick Concerts, whose initial inspiration in 1915 was to organize a concert series for the relief of refugees of the First World War. The centenary of the death of Gustav Mahler and the 20th anniversary of that of Leonard Bernstein are the perfect lenses through which to view classical music anew—especially as 2011 also marks the bicentennial of the birth of another of the great virtuoso composers, Hungarian Franz Liszt.

By “virtuoso composer” I mean a musician equally brilliant as composer, conductor and pianist as well as a true public intellectual of the arts—a kind of figure who first arose in the Romantic era of the 19th century, with its unprecedented marriage of mass media and a new, powerful, music-hungry middle class.

Liszt, Mahler and Bernstein were all cut from this cloth, egotistical yet enormously generous personalities who loved classical and popular musics—think of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, Mahler’s klezmer riffs and folk song quotes, Bernstein’s love affair with Broadway and jazz—and all shamelessly politically engagé.

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As our image of Liszt is still that of being the first classical musician with rock-star status—with his notoriously varied romantic life and his late-stage journey into Roman Catholic mysticism—it’s easy to forget his extraordinary mentoring to two entire generations of young pianists and to younger composers as far-flung as Grieg, Balakirev and Borodin, his subtle yet intense involvement in Austro-Hungarian politics and even his support of the gifted yet unstable Robert Schumann when no one else dared.

The summits of his middle period were his symphonic poems,

to the greatest line-up of jazz pianists we’ve ever had to a rare, complete performance of Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook—the masterpiece of one of the Romantic era’s tragic heroes and a rival of the young Mahler when the two Vienna Conservatory students shared a room.

Renee Samuels

It is surely an eclecticism that Bernstein himself would have appreciated and, in that spirit, our 2011 Maverick season will culminate on Labor Day weekend with the world premiere of my arrangement for chamber orchestra, with Robert Osborne, of one of Bernstein’s most underrated masterpieces, SONGFEST, written for our nation’s Bicentennial and beautifully attempting to take in all of American culture in its maddening diversity. If Liszt (as we’ll remember in that weekend’s performance of his B-Minor Sonata) led music into a limitless future, then it would be Bernstein, inheriting Mahler’s magic ring, who would try to lead it back into a viable present and an embraceable past. SONGFEST is perhaps the greatest emblem of that effort on Bernstein’s part, the chaos of the earlier Mass reined in towards a more classically oriented model. Its supreme eclecticism demands a fresh hearing.

Compared to Bernstein, Mahler and Liszt, Hervey White, founder of Maverick Concerts, was certainly no virtuoso; half Whitman’s “poet carpenter,” half priest of the arts, he and his friends built our gloriously intimate “music chapel” 96 years ago on little more than instinct. Yet it is the other side of the virtuosity exemplified by those three titans, that sense of radical, all-embracing generosity, with which White would truly have found common cause and which still resonates for us today—through the countless artists who have blessed this hall with the purity of their talent and by the equally countless volunteers across the last century who have made the Maverick their cause.

the first-ever examples of the genre; in his last years, piano and chamber pieces of extraordinary daring poured from his pen.

Just as Mahler would actively champion Liszt and his radical mode of expression, culminating in a kind of musical “primal scream” on the verge of the First World War, so Bernstein would consciously inherit the mantle of Mahler, in succeeding to his post as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic and in completely adopting his pantheistic, all-embracing view of the symphonic genre. Bernstein’s passionate involvement in the political maelstrom of his own time went hand-in-hand with his musical, personal and spiritual explorations. Mahler, too, was a committed social democrat; without him could there ever have been a Bernstein Kaddish or Jeremiah Symphony, a Chichester Psalms or such a thing as Mass?

~ Alexander Platt Maverick Concerts Music Director

Simon Russel

And while many of us who personally experienced Leonard Bernstein’s generosity of spirit—myself included, at Tanglewood— are still very much alive, it seems the right time to connect his ideals with those of two of his greatest forbears across the centuries. In true Maverick fashion, we’ll celebrate these themes across the spectrum of classical, family, contemporary and jazz programming. While our Sunday afternoon concerts will always remain as showcases for the talent of the finest classical musicians in America today, our Saturday nights this year will range from the Maverick debut of the genre-bending string quartet ETHEL 5

Betty Ballantine Remembers

In 1941 my father-in-law—the actor E.J. Ballantine (Teddy)—and his director-friend Cecil Clovelly began planning to put together a Student Theater for young actors and actresses. They would get on-the-job training, putting on a new show each week at the grand old Maverick Theater, which had been home to similar young companies since its creation in the early years of the century, launching such eventual luminaries as Edward G. Robinson and Helen Hayes.

The Maverick Theater was part of a complex of concert hall, theater and rustic cabins built by Hervey White and his volunteer helpers, the cabins to serve as housing for resident artists, sculptors, writers and musicians—in short, a self-supporting Art Colony, the perfect setting for a rent-free Student Theater.

The theater stood on a natural slope stretching down to the stage, backed by the dressing-rooms, the whole structure supported by bare, soaring tree-trunks set directly in the dirt “floor.” Like its fellow wooden buildings the theater had no formal facilities, no power and no running water. But it seated 600, on hand-made wooden benches, had superb acoustics, a really picturesque setting and an authentic air of Elizabethan splendor.

The students, most in their early twenties with a couple of lateteenagers, were housed in the cottages and fed in a building equipped with plumbing and power just across the road. And the food was great, prepared by two ladies, Happyheart and Truelove (acolytes of Father Divine), who resided at the back of the “restaurant.”

Although I first visited Woodstock in mid-1939 to meet my brand-new in-laws, my husband, Ian Ballantine, and I were basically city-dwellers immersed in establishing a new publishing house. Mid-1940, however, saw the birth of our son and an opportunity to get better acquainted with Woodstock and the family. From that time forward I would spend summers in the country.

When the opening season of the Student Theater was finally launched, I was recruited as “gofer,” which meant I worked backstage doing make-up, helping actors practice their lines (the woods were full of murmuring voices rehearsing) and driving a huge, open Cadillac tourer, a highly suitable vehicle for the transport of borrowed furniture for stage sets, together with whatever outlandish props were needed—including, on one

Photos on this page- Above: Betty Ballantine in 1945.

Right: Teddy Ballantine (with moustache) among fellow revelers.

Oppostite page: Mrs. Hale, Eugene Ludins, Polly Rosen, Bill Hale, Olga Hale, William Harlan Hale, 1930.

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famous occasion, an enormous St. Bernard. I housed and fed the borrowed beast and remember driving through the village each evening for the week-long run, the magnificent canine seated in conscious dignity in the back seat. Of course he was not actually trained for the stage, but it was just a walk-on part…. However,

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he was a friendly fellow, and each evening he broke up his scene by lumbering down the steps to greet his admirers—while the actors waited, and waited, desperately improvising. It all caused a great deal of hilarity and was a notable achievement in audience participation. Luckily the play was a comedy.

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“You need a loud-mouth Texan for that part,” he remarked, & added, “Why not try Lee Marvin?” shortage produced by the war, people were traveling as little as possible, and New York City discovered Woodstock as a nearby holiday resort. Eddie and José, echoing a famously raucous tradition of the oldtime Maverick, organized several colorful festivals, together with costume events, picnics, competitions and parties by way of publicity to attract newcomers to the top-of-the-line entertainment being offered at the quaintly romantic “Theater in the Woods.” They were highly successful.

The Student Theater ran for a couple of seasons, garnering respectably sized audiences and actually launching the career of Margaret Phillips on Broadway, while half-a-dozen lesser lights landed happily in Hollywood—one of whom became the fifth husband of a famous star. Eventually, however, Clovelly was called to a directorship that took him away from Woodstock, and the Student Theater came to its end.

Meanwhile, the success of the “Theater in the Woods” had attracted a young, would-be director named José Quintero. José teamed up with a local artist, Eddie Mann, who had theatrical ambitions and a steady income from his cartooning—enough anyway to allow them to put together a small company, pay royalties and brave the primitive (but low-cost) venue of the Maverick, at least for an experimental season.

That season, and those that followed, saw some really brilliant theater at the Maverick. José, Eddie and the dedicated group of actors they developed reinforced the proud history of the Maverick as a breeding ground for talent. A number of the young actors were “4-F,” hence not eligible for active duty in World War II. Moreover, with the serious gas

At the end of their second season the company stuck together and headed for New York, where they managed to rent a theater downtown in the Village. Nobody needed to know that virtually the entire company took up residence in the theater, at least until they became financially viable—and famous—as the Circle in the Square. Wonderful how really good theater manages to triumph over a seemingly perennial shortage of money.

Meanwhile, the following year, the summer amenities of the Maverick were once again available. This time, a promising professional traveling company arrived to test the woods for fame and fortune. Because of the long-time association of the Ballantine family with the Maverick, the entire company was invited to David Ballantine’s 21st birthday party… along with some 200 locals. Somewhere in the wee hours the producer was lamenting the terrible crisis occasioned by the abrupt departure of their leading man just before the company was due to open with Lynn Rigg’s Roadside, a well-known country comedy, a venerable “oater.” Crisis is common in the theater, and Teddy was totally sympathetic. “You need a loudmouth Texan for that part,” he remarked, and added, “Why not try Lee Marvin? Hey, Lee!” Lee lounged over, eyed the expectant group and said two words in that gravelly,

basso profundo of his: “What’s up?� The producer didn’t hesitate. “Would you care to read for a part?� Lee’s response was equally prompt—and totally casual: “Sure. Why not?� Like most of us, he was feeling no pain.

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We spent the next three days working the script. Lee never really learned the actual dialog, but he did grasp the continuity of the plot, and being an absolute natural on stage, he always managed to keep talking long enough to cue the other actors to pick up the threadâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; somewhereâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and carry the plot forward. It made for gut-wrenching drama for his fellow performers and for those of us in the know. Lee stayed with the company for the rest of the season doing bit parts. In the Fall he attended acting school on the G.I. Bill, joined another company and toured, playing the lead in A Streetcar Named Desire, was picked up by Hollywood and never looked back.

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Alas, the beautiful, old, wooden structure with its roots set firmly in the ground also provided a joyous home for termites, and in time they took over. The great building became unsafe and had to be taken down, succumbing to the natural worldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the stage on which it had played so significant a partâ&#x20AC;Ś thus, as it were, staying in characterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in the best traditions of the many actors, musicians, playwrights and thespians of all stripes which the splendid theater had helped to create.

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A Child of the Maverick

“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born, the little window where the sun, came peeping in at morn.”

As I think about these words written by Thomas Hood I am bombarded with images of growing up on the Maverick, and I feel like Alice In Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole shrinking to my eight-year-old size. It is a place where time collapses, and yet I have the sensation of expanding, as if seeing things again that have been long hidden.

By Robin Raymond

Hervey White rented a small house in the woods above the concert hall (for $50 a year) to my father, Henry Morton Robinson, a young writer, and his 20-year-old wife, Gertrude. I was brought there as a new-born baby. My earliest memory is that I was always barefoot and always outside. The Maverick Colony was my playground.

The Maverick Horse carved by John Flanagan stood sentinel over me, rising as it did at the entrance to the Concert Hall road. It was my compass from which I could explore in any direction. I ran the forest floor with the certainty of a deer. I always thought (or did I pretend?) I was an Indian girl with long black braids. Somehow my mother always knew I was safe when I went out to play. Emmy Edwards, son of Eleanor and Emmett Edwards (a working artist in the Maverick Colony) was my exploring friend. Behind the Intellegencia restaurant was a big quarry where we would catch tadpoles with our bare hands, put them in a mason jar and watch them become frogs. From there I would find the path to Wendell and Janey Jones’ house where they would give me a cookie or a slice of apple as I watched them paint. One morning Janey asked me if she could paint my portrait. It was not easy for me to sit still and pose for her.

During this time our family moved into what is now the white house across from the Concert Hall entrance. The family now included my younger sister, Hannele, and my little brother, Anthony Robinson. My mother would send me with a roast beef sandwich to give to Hervey White where he lived in his tiny house in a glade of myrtle. He and I never talked very much, but he loved to lie on his bed and listen to the musicians practicing behind his house. The concert hall was my North Star as I would follow the music through the trees and sit on a mossy knoll and listen. It was as natural as listening to the wind.

“My earliest memory is that I was always barefoot and always outside. The Maverick Colony was my playground. ”

Photos on this page: Top left- Painting by Jane Jones of Robin Raymond at 9 years old.

Left- Unknown, Florence Cramer, Margot Cramer Taylor, Konrad Cramer & Aileen Cramer

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There were quite a few children my age on the Maverick during the late ‘30s: Georgie and Nadia Koutzen, Dickie Barzin, Johnny Nichols, Steven Finckel. I always loved walking barefoot up the dirt road to Steven’s house to listen to his father, George Finckel, playing the cello. The sounds coming from that instrument have thrilled me ever since. The concert pianist, Vladamir Padwa, gave me piano lessons and tried to navigate me through the world of chords, notes, arpeggios. I think because my father was a writer it was words, not musical notes, that came more easily to me as a child. My father taught me to read before I entered first grade, and for special occasions I had to write a poem or memorize one or write a story. But I feel it was the music from the concert hall floating through the trees that has sustained me all my life.

the leaves, echoing off the bluestone ledges. It was as natural as the air I breathed. I was never aware of this unique environment because, in truth, I was living it.

One Sunday that I remember so well I saw my father leaning against a tree with his head on his arms and his shoulders heaving.

Alarmed, I asked my mother, “Why is Daddy crying?” She put her hand on my arm and gently said to me, “Because the music is so beautiful.”

Those were the early years when the woods, the stones, the music seeped into my bloodstream. Now that I have returned to Woodstock after all these decades my memory feels the shock of recognition, and through this filter I am feeling home again. It is a return to the geography of my childhood where I felt great comfort and safety. Not too much has really changed.

The dirt road to the Concert Hall is the same, although Hervey White’s house has dissolved into the luscious myrtle.

The music still wafts through the trees, and my love of space and silence that surrounded me as a child of the woods is as strong as it ever was. The special sunlight that filters through the branches always bewitched me. Poetry, painting and music all seem blended together to become the DNA of my soul. And yes, I feel a quickening as I recall the first lines of Thomas Hood’s poem, “I remember, I remember, the house where I was born.”

My father and mother established a tradition of inviting their artist friends for Sunday dinner at 2 o’clock. Wendy and Janey Jones, Hannah and Gene Ludins, Frank Mele, Doris Lee, Arnold Blanch, Joe Pollet, Raoul Hague, Amy and John Small all were family to me. My mother must have had a special connection with the butcher at Happy’s grocery store: “Give me a really good roast beef this week, and oh, please throw in some suet for the birds.” Roast beef never tasted as sweet as it did on those Sunday dinners. We could hear the musicians tuning up at the Concert Hall, so after dinner we would grab a blanket and some pillows and everyone would walk up the dirt road to the Concert Hall and listen under the trees. I grew up with music in my soul. It seemed to be sifting through

~ Robin Raymond

Photos on this page: Top; Addie Risse, Gioja Stalforth Webster, Anita Stalforth, unknown.

Right; Dr. & Mrs. Downer with Grandchildren (Joan Goetz, Faith Goetz, and Lee Downer)

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Restoration of the Hall

The design of the hall was conceived by Hervey White; built of boards and logs covered with bark, it was inspired by the communal houses of the Fiji Islands. To this were added doorways which suggested a Gothic religious structure, as did the windows, formed of barn sash set diagonally in great clusters. This “chapel” in the woods embodied Hervey’s belief that the concerts were akin to religious experiences.

by Cornelia Rosenblum

In 1976, 60 years after it was built, reinforcing cables, additional uprights, crossbeams and diagonals to support other beams had been added. The roof was sagging, main beams had weakened, and the foundation and footings needed firming up. In addition, panes of glass were missing and the two exterior walls had been covered with tar paper to keep out the rain. The hall was in need of a major reconstruction. Chairman of the board David Robison and vicechairman John Ebbs raised the funds needed for this major project with heartening speed through individual contributions. A plaque on the wall of the concert hall acknowledges the major donors to the restoration.

I was brought to the hall as a young child by my parents when, I recall, my major effort was to sit still... but I also must have listened because I developed a life-long passion for chamber music and a great love for the hall. Later, in my teens, when Maverick incorporated as a nonprofit, I was recruited by Hilda Cohen to become one of its first board members, little understanding that I would be serving on the board for many decades and became Chairman for a number of years. When the reconstruction of the hall became a pressing need I knew the perfect person to design and supervise this project was my father, Leonhard (“Loo”) Hartmann, a native of the Netherlands, an artist, sculptor and engineer. He had known the Maverick in its early days, first visiting on his

Our beloved concert hall is unique, built in 1916 with native lumber by local builder Dayton Shultis, resident carpenters and music students, Leon Barzin, the eminent conductor, among them. Hervey White determined that the hall would be devoted to “the highest class of music,” known as chamber music.

The building and the land on which it stands were generously deeded to the Maverick Sunday Concerts in 1958 by Cornelius Van der Loo. Photos on this page: Above- Restoration of the hall in 1977 Above right- Cornelia Hartmann Rosenblum age 4.

Right- photo by Steve Tilly. Oppositie page- David Robison, Art Ricks, Loo Hartmann, Bob (Eric) Carlson, & John Ebbs.

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motorcycle in the late 1920s and meeting my mother there when she, a dancer, was living in the Maverick, performing with the Mura Dehn dance group at the Woodstock Firemanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hall and participating in that yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Maverick Festival. Later my parents bought a home in Woodstock, where we spent summers.

In 1976, having retired from his working career as an engineer, my father was living in Woodstock and devoting his time to drawing and sculpture. A chemical and mechanical engineer, he had designed and built several projects using native lumber and had a real feeling for the kind of building the hall represented.

Although it needed major structural reinforcement, great care was taken to preserve the original character of the hall. He designed a series of wooden trusses, which gave the building added strength and permitted the removal of several posts that had been added over the years to shore up the roof. Local lumber was specified and cut well in advance in order to cure and blend with the existing sections of weathered timbers and siding that were possible to preserve. The work was carried out by a local contractor, Art Ricks. Adolph Heckeroth and his crew installed the new electrical wiring.

My father supervised the project from start to finish, contributing all of his work. It was definitely not a run-of-the mill job, and many times the work crew found themselves scrambling on high beams and scaffolding in a rather daring manner. One of the carpenters, Marc Ebbs, a musician, made cabinetry and furnishings for the newly expanded green room as a contribution to the Maverick.

The rebuilding of the hall was completed in time for the 1977 season. It was the kind of collaboration that embodied the original spirit of the Maverick. ~ Cornelia Hartmann Rosenblum Chairman Emeritus

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Owned & Operated by Dr. Saul Schulich & Sean Schulich, flutist (stop by and you just might find me playing) Follow us WINES & SPIRITS on Facebook Open 7 Days On Route 28, Next to Stewartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 845-684-5383 In 1968 Jean Gaede and Fritzi Striebel began the task of documenting Woodstockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Maverick Art Colony, founded in 1905 by Hervey White as a utopian community for musicians, artists, writers, and actors.

As one of the founders of the Byrdcliffe Colony at Woodstock, White had become disillusioned with its management and goals and set out to found his own colony, where creative individuals could be free to pursue their own avenues of expression. Gaede and Striebel were enchanted with the Maverick story and started an oral history project, recording the recollections of artists who had been an active part of the Colony. The result is a collection of some 47 oral histories recorded between 1968 and 1979 preserved on 40 cassette tapes. A small selection of these recollections were transcribed and can be found in Woodstock Gatherings: Apple Bites and Ashes by Jean Lasher Gaede.

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Linking Collections, Building Connections: Works from the Hudson Valley Visual Art Collections Consortium August 24 – December 11, 2011 THE

DORSKY

Consortium members: Center for Photography at Woodstock Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art Women’s Studio Workshop Woodstock Artists Association & Museum Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild

Theodore Roszak, Woodstock, 1928, Lithograph Collection of the Dorsky Museum Gift of Sara Jane Roszak

SAMUEL DORSKY MUSEUM OF ART

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT NEW PALTZ

W W W.N E W PA LTZ.E D U / M U S E U M Open Wed. – Sun. 11 am – 5 pm | 845/257-3844

MAVERICK

concert festival 2011 Call 845-679-8217 for concert information or visit Maverick Concerts online at www.maverickconcerts.org.

Email: maverickmuse@aol.com Maverick Concerts, P.O. Box 9, Woodstock N.Y. 12498

“Bernstein and Friends” and the Maverick Concerts 96th season, the “Virtuoso Composer,” are supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Maverick Concerts are made possible in part with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Scan the QR code above with your smartphone to visit MaverickConcerts.org

Construction at the Maverick Concert Hall is supported in part by a Save America’s Treasures grant, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Maverick Concerts thanks Congressman Maurice Hinchey for securing this funding.

The C7 grand piano appears through the generosity of Yamaha Artist Services.

Maverick Concerts, Inc., is designated as a 501(c) (3) organization.

1 All contributions are fully tax-deductible as allowed by law.