Vermont Mozart Festival

By Jim Lowe

Mozart and Vermont summers have merges for a spectacularly successful 22 years producing what are perhaps the best-attended acoustic concerts in the state. This summer, July 16-Aug.6, some 17,000 people are expected to attend 17 concerts at 10 northern Vermont locations, most notably the spectacular Shelburne Farms. 

Much of the success is due to the incredible popularity of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1765-1971) of “Amadeus” fame, but it’s not just Mozart. This year’s festival promises jazz, the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht “Threepenny Opera,” a concert version of the Johann Strauss Jr. operetta, “Die Fledermaus” and even a “baseball concert”.

Created in 1974, the Vermont Mozart Festival was the brainchild of Melvin Kalan. William Metcalfe, and Jim Chapman. Kaplan was a New York oboist and concert artist-manager who had just moved to Vermont; Metcalfe was acting head of the UVM Music Department; and Chapman was the director of the UVM Choral union.

Mozart was chosen, not only because of his genius for beautiful music, but because the hills of Vermont art so much like the composer's native Austria, Kaplan, the festival’s artistic director explained. 

“Almost all of Mozart is wonderful, not all, but almost all of it,” added Metcalfe, now one of the festival's principal conductors. “A lot of its available to relatively small ensembles, There's A wonderful corpus of chamber music. Practically as well as aesthetically, it was perfect for us up here- perfect to build a festival which would not just peter out after a few years,” he said. 

The three talked with Jack Trevithick, then head of the UVM Lane Series, who said it wouldn’t work, but offered his office as an umbrella for selling tickets. Metcalfe approached Peter Fox Smith, then head of the Vermont council on the Arts, who offered to find $10,000 for each of the next two years. 

“The third thing is that we put together a group of ladies here in town who cared about these things,” Kaplan explains. “Those three elements made it work- I think we sold every ticket.”

For the first two years (the first festival lasted two weeks and the second spanned three weeks) only Mozart was presented. The first season included performances by the Fine Arts Quartet, Menahem Pressler playing three Mozart Piano Concerti with just four string players on the Lake Champlain Ferry. “By chance, we closed with Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ (for chorus and orchestra), which we have closed all 21 seasons with,” Kaplan said.

“It was an incredible success,” Metcalfe added. “The first concert was in the UVM Barn off Spear Street after they had had a cattle show. That barn had a kind of barrel-vault effect with a wonderful acoustic; unfortunately it also had some fairly bizarre smells. UVM had an experimental whey disposal pond in the back, and the wind changed just before the concert in a most unfortunate way,” laughed Metcalfe, who conducted the concert.

Still, it was just the beginning, “I remember lying on the grass just outside the UVM show barn when Bill was rehearsing something inside,” Kaplan said, “and somebody coming up to me and asking what we wou;d be doing next year, and the year after. I said I didn’t know if there was going to be a next year-which was the truth.”

But there was a future, and much of that future has been at one of Vermont’s most spectacular locations- the Webb’s Shelburne Farms estate overlooking Lake Champlain. “When this all started, I had always liked barns. I looked through a book on barns and saw Shelburne Farms,” Kaplan recalled. 

He then arranges to meet Mrs. Webb for tea at her home.” I certainly was never floored as much as first seeing all that [the estate]. The first time you see it, ui can’t believe it exists anywhere, let alone Vermont. Curiously enough, almost nobody in this community had ever seen it- it was a private come,” Kaplan recalled. 

Brashly, Kaplan suggested holding the Mozart festival concerts there, and Webb agreed. “That was a big surprise, and we actually planned the festival around doing it in all the various buildings there,” Kaplan said. “But about six months before the festival began, the family got cold feet. We ended up doing a couple of the concerts there, but because of that, we were forced to look to what else could be used- which established what turned out to be an extremely successful formula.” 

This year, the Vermont Mozart Festival will, of course, offer many traditional concerts. David Fedele will be featured in the Mozart D Major Flute Concerto. Cellist Steven Doane will perform Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo Variations,” Daniel Epstein will be featured in Chopin’s piano Concerto No.1 in e minor. New York pianist Lilian Kallir will perform two Mozart concerti. The popular all-sibling Ying Quartet returned, as well as the Angeles String Quartet. One concert will feature three virtuoso trumpeters in music of Bach, Telemann and Vivaldi.

This year’s festival will offer its first modern music concert, featuring 20th century music by Carter, Stravinsku, and Davidovsku, July 19 at the Robert Paul Gallery in Burlington. “It’s the right thing to do,” Kaplan said, “It’s not an enormous amount of money, If we don’t have a big audience, it won’t make a big difference. And if we do, maybe it will encourage everybody to do more,” he said.

But it’s not all serious. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” July 30th in Stowe, a tribute to baseball, will induce “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” the overture to “Damn Yankees,” the “national Game March” of John Philip Sousa, “Casey At The Bat,” and Gershwin’s “Strnk Up the Band,”

Metcalfe will conduct a fully staged production of “The Threepenny Opera,” with Donald Rowe directing. Metcalfe will also present a concert version, in English, of the Strauss Operetta, “Die Fledermaus,” which he calls, “A Bat’s Gentle Revenge.”

In addition, the festival will offer workshops- a string chamber music workshop (July 17-21), a trumpet workshop including jazz (July 24-28, and a cello workshop with Steven Doane (July 31-August 4). 

Jim Lowe is the arts editor of The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.