The Light in the Forest
Maverick Concerts 2008 Season
by Peter Aaron
Built just outside of the village of Woodstock in 1916 by Maverick Art Colony founder Hervey White, Maverick Concert Hall is a beautiful, hand-hewn wooden “music chapel” in a fairy-tale forest setting; similar, perhaps, to the rural “composing huts” used by Gustav Mahler, who along with Franz Schubert is the focus of the hall’s 2008 season. While the Maverick’s towering, barn-like scale would certainly have dwarfed Mahler’s more intimately designed sheds, which actually makes the structure one the Austrian composer, famous for his ambitious, large-scoped works, would very well likely have found most agreeable.
“Oh, Mahler would have absolutely loved the Maverick,” says conductor Alexander Platt, now entering his sixth year as the music director of the event, which is the oldest continuously running summer chamber music festival in America. “And being a modernist he would’ve also approved of what we’re doing with our Woodstock Legends series, which presents concerts by jazz and other, for lack of a better term, ‘non-classical’ artists throughout the season.”
Der Mahler, as he was known around his native Vienna, and Platt actually go back a ways. The conductor became the toast of the classical world in 1991 when he reconstructed conductor Erwin Stein’s “lost” 1921 chamber arrangement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony using only the vague notes Stein had made in the margins of the full symphonic score. “[Arranging the piece] was a very mysterious story,” recalls Platt, 45, who worked with Stein’s daughter to decipher her late father’s handwritten instructions. “The parts that Stein had prepared for the individual players were lost. So making the chamber version was painstaking work, far more complex than I’d imagined it would be.”...CONTINUE...
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