Music Mountain Celebrates 90
Think what life was like in 1930. The landscape in the Northwest Corner of the state was largely agrarian. Housatonic Valley Regional High School, which drew the six towns of the district into a geographic unit, was still 10 years in the future. Country roads, still unpaved, were so muddy and impassable much of the year that a statewide campaign to “Get Connecticut Out of the Mud” was started that year. And about the only place to cool off during a hot summer evening was at the local movie theater which was experimenting with that newfangled concept: air conditioning.
With the Great Depression only a year old, it took a leap of faith for Jacques Gordon (1898-1948), a Russian emigré and for many years the Chicago Symphony’s first violinist, to found a musical mecca atop an obscure mountain in a rural town but Music Mountain, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year and claims the title of the oldest continuing summer chamber music festival in this country, has been presenting classical masterpieces of the chamber music catalogue ever since.
Set on a hilltop surrounded by 125 acres of meadows, it is a welcoming venue for a pre-performance picnic or twilight stroll. Concerts are given by a first-class artists from around the world from June to September in Gordon Hall, a white clapboard building designed by Sears, Roebuck and Co. Four other buildings house visiting artists and students and make up the Music Mountain compound.
Jacques Gordon’s son, Nicholas, took the helm of Music Mountain for many decades after his father’s death, contended that one reason for the continuing popularity of the venue was the acoustics of its music hall. He recalled that his father worked with a Sears, Roebuck architect to design it like a fiddle. The 100-by-38-foot hall’s interior chamber is paneled with nothing but stain on the wood, so it can vibrate. The walls are hollow with no insulation and below the floor is a tapering crawl space that creates a vibrating chamber.
And that air conditioning we mentioned earlier—it didn’t make it to the top of Music Mountain until the early 2000s but even today balmy summer evenings are so delightful atop the mountain that the French doors are thrown open to let the zephyrs in.
The property and the buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Music Mountain is marking its 90th year by continuing to do what it does so well—putting the Classics front and center, including seven string quartets by Beethoven.
The season runs through September 22nd and will be punctuated by the Saturday “azz and More Twilight Series at 5PM. New this season will be two evenings of Cabaret, the first by Steve Ross and the second by Barbara Fasano and Eric Comstock.
Labor Day Weekend will bring the Shanghai Quartet performing back-to-back Saturday and Sunday concerts to celebrate its 30th anniversary at Music Mountain.
For a full schedule of events and ticket prices, please click on the link below.
