But for the first weekend in August, after Fred Hersh plays jazz on Saturday, another string quartet performs on Sunday, August 2 at 4 p.m.: the Escher String Quartet. I am very fond of this program: Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op. 50, No. 6 (one of the many Haydn masterpieces that aren’t as familiar as they should be); Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 (his first masterpiece); and Schubert’s Quartet in A Minor, D. 804.
And the following weekend is “All String Quartets All the Time,” including the Young People’s Concert on the 8th by the Miró Quartet. The same ensemble returns in the evening at 6 p.m. to play two huge masterpieces: Beethoven’s Op. 131 and Schubert’s final Quartet, D. 887. The next day, Sunday, August 9 at 4, the Danish String Quartet, in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, makes its Maverick debut playing (what else?) a Danish string quartet: the Quartet No. 1 of Carl Nielsen. The program also includes Arcadiana by the popular British composer Thomas Adès, who last year conducted his opera The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera, and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 9.
In past years we would have been rounding third and heading for home by this date, but this year we have a full month of music to go. After jazz on August 15, Trio Solisti – long a favorite Maverick ensemble – plays on Sunday, August 16 at 4 p.m. a program of Schubert, Rachmaninov and Brahms. Brahms wrote three great trios, but No. 1 (revised late in life) is played far more often than the other two; we’ll be hearing No. 2 in this concert.
Saturday, August 22, at 6 p.m. is the annual chamber orchestra concert, in which Alexander Platt demonstrates how fine a musician he is. This program includes Britten’s Young Apollo (a welcome rarity); the original 1915 chamber version of Falla’s El Amór Brujo with the great Maria Todaro as soloist; and the original chamber version of Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite. There will also be solo works by two Woodstock composers, Henry Cowell and Robert Starer.
On Sunday, August 22, the Ariel Quartet plays Beethoven’s Razumovsky No. 2; Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet (did you know that Stravinsky wrote for string quartet?); and Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No. 1. Baritone Thomas Storm joins the ensemble in Barber’s Dover Beach. All these performers are making Maverick debuts.
August 29 and still going strong: Pianists Frederic Chiu and Andrew Russo perform at 8 p.m. Schubert’s Divertissement à la Hongroise is a lengthy and masterful work, but you won’t hear it in a month of Sundays. The two pianists will end the concert with Stravinsky’s original four-hand version of The Rite of Spring. In between come two solo works, Griffes’ Three Tone Pictures and Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives. On Sunday, the 30th, the great Borromeo String Quartet plays Gunther Schuller’s String Quartet No. 4, along with works of Haydn and Beethoven.
Still two weeks to go! On Saturday, September 5, at 8 p.m., “Woodstock legend” (got that right!) Happy Traum returns with some friends for a folk program. On Sunday, September 6 at 4 p.m., the Dover Quartet makes its Maverick debut in the annual Friends of the Maverick concert. Regular tickets don’t apply for this one, a special “thank-you” to donors who support the series. The program includes works of Wolf, Janàcek and Schumann.
Two more Woodstock legends, Marc Black and Warren Bernhardt, start off the final weekend on Saturday, September 12 at 8 p.m. Marc’s programs are usually made up mostly of his original songs, which are excellent. The season ends with a bang on Sunday, September 13 at 4 p.m. The American String Quartet, rightly described by Maverick as “one of the world’s foremost string quartets,” opens its concert with the last of the season’s premieres: George Tsontakis’ String Quartet 7.5, another centennial commission (so-called because it’s relatively brief). That program also includes the first of Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets and the Mendelssohn Quartet in D, Op. 44, No. 1.
Newcomers to Maverick will want to know that you can usually buy tickets to a concert until starting time. However, most seats are unreserved, and listeners begin to show up well in advance (usually more than an hour) to get good seats. Books of ten tickets are available at any time and, unlike seasons of the past, these days you can save unused tickets for the following season. If you’re planning to attend several concerts, a ticket book is an excellent investment, and it can be used by more than one person. You can bring nine friends and use a single ticket book. Www.maverickconcerts.org has lots of information, clearly stated, along with opportunities to buy the small number of higher-priced tickets for reserved seating.
In a way, this programming lives up to the expectations that the 100th anniversary season will be something special. The emphases on premieres, composers from our area living and dead and American music in general are unusual and all welcome. But in its variety and promises of excellence, this season looks a lot like a typical Maverick summer. Am I getting spoiled?
– Leslie Gerber
Maverick remembrances
Alexander Platt:
How do I reminisce upon the Maverick? How do I reflect upon a century of music, a steady, unbroken stream of beautiful creativity, of which I am merely the latest tributary?
All I can really say is how thrilled I am about this Centennial season of the Maverick Concerts. Founded, as we all know, by the inspiration and the camaraderie of Hervey White – who, like me (and this may not be well-known), was a transplanted Chicagoan – the Maverick has survived an entire century, through wars, hurricanes, pestilence and depressions both tropical and economic, for what are really three very simple reasons: a devoted audience, devoted to music and not creature comforts; a devotion to the highest musical quality; and perhaps most of all, the unending devotion of an amazing band of volunteers, whether they be Friends, donors, Board members or Trustees.
It’s for these reasons also that, for the last 12 of those last hundred years, I’ve been able to serve the Maverick as its music director, adding both more concerts and concerts of ever-greater variety each season. This year will certainly be no exception, as we bring to our beloved Hall some of the very best in the classical, world, folk and jazz scene today. Especially now, with my mother having just passed away, I really can’t wait to get back to my mountain perch, to see those everlasting hills and everyone again.
Peter Schickele:
In general, I’m not a big fan of music in natural surroundings; the natural surroundings usually win out. But a big exception is the Maverick. Something about its size and the spirit of its founders keeps it vibrant and focused. Ever since John Cage “wrote” his famous piece 4’33”, in which the sounds of nature are given their due, the Maverick usually holds its own, with topnotch players performing for a sophisticated audience that can appreciate Bartók as an encore. Here’s to the next 100 years.
Robert Starer (from an article compiled by Gail Godwin for Maverick’s program book):
When Maverick Concerts asked me to write a work for Paula Robison in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the concert series, I decided to write Yizkor – Hebrew for “in memory of” – to honor Naomi Robison, Paula’s mother, a resident of Woodstock like myself and an active sponsor of these concerts. I vividly remembered a dramatic moment at an earlier concert of Paula’s at the Maverick, when her terminally ill mother had been brought from the hospital to hear her. It was a rainy, stormy afternoon and at one point lightning struck so near that Paula, quite startled, stopped playing. She looked at her mother questioningly, and Naomi said loudly and forcefully, “Play on, Paula.”
Hervey’s windows
I find that I spend a lot of time at concerts “looking around,” since as a composer, I spend a lot of time at concerts. Listening to music is okay, but there is a lot more to a concert than what meets the ear.
As a part-time carpenter who designed and built much of his own home and studio, I find myself often fixated on the concert venue as a building – the vessel that holds the music. A “countryman” of mine, Yiannis Xenakis, designed a pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair that also served as the basis of a musical composition performed within it.
Shortly after moving to Shokan in 1988, I went to my first Maverick concert. Yes, the music was great, but I was struck as much by Hervey White’s clever design of the “barn” and the large, perfectly asymmetrical window displays. It did not take me staring at those displays for very long before I realized, “Hey! Those are just a bunch of six-pane attic windows, the exact workaday windows in the shell of my stone studio, which was first constructed circa 1910!” They were the “default” window back then, and are still sold today. Yes, he tied together a whole bunch of ‘em – how ingenious! And how “compositional” to take a small kernel, a “cell,” and expand it into a landscape. Bach… “If music be the window to the soul…play on!”
– George Tsontakis
