Hidden treasures

Classical music camps are a summer gold mine

By Doug Hubley

ERIC ROSENBLITH: bringing a little class to Fryeburg for the IMAI.

In the realm of things to avoid, most of us would agree that summer school ranks right up there with scabies and people who refer to themelves in the third person. But the music world often softens the blow of summertime learning by moving it from big-city classrooms to the verdant tranquillity of the rural northern states. And as a state with more than its share of V.T., Maine has welcomed formative musicians and their mentors for at least a century.

Maine’s summer music programs tend to take root in settings either academic or rural. Among the former, the best-known institute may be the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, based at Bowdoin College, though it severed administrative ties with the college a few years ago. Its location at a major liberal arts college, top-notch faculty and guest artists, and $1 million-plus budget certainly make the BSMF the brightest star in the summer sky.

But just as interesting are programs tucked away in small Maine towns like Blue Hill, where the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival continues a 99-year-old tradition. Or how about what goes on this month in Sidney — despite a recent fire that destroyed its caretaker’s house and a barn filled with recreational equipment — when the New England Music Camp (NEMC) begins its 65th summer of building teen character. For the month of July in Fryeburg, the International Musical Arts Institute (IMAI) is as much musical salon as school, genially directed by Eric Rosenblith, a violinist and longtime member of the New England Conservatory faculty.

At summer’s height more classical music gets played in these three little towns than in mighty Portland. The public is welcome to hear much of it. At the NEMC, most concerts are free and student performances predominate. (The lakeside camp’s “Bowl in the Pines” is one of the nation’s largest acoustic shells.) Kneisel Hall’s faculty is exceptional, and further elevating public concerts are guest artists like the Cavani Quartet.

The IMAI, meanwhile, brings to Fryeburg Academy active professionals at diverse career stages, from recent grads to Rosenblith himself, with his international performing history and three decades at NEC. He eschews the traditional student-teacher hierarchy in favor of simply asking more-experienced players to guide the less-experienced — who, he says, “want to be treated with dignity and sensitivity and respect for their artistry, at whatever stage they are.”

Each institute has a well-defined niche. Music at the NEMC ranges from chamber to brass band, but it’s just for teens and as much about strengthening character as honing chops. IMAI and Kneisel Hall concentrate on giving young professionals or pre-professionals an immersion in chamber music they are unlikely to get elsewhere. “When they come here it’s a gift,” says Kneisel Hall Executive Director Ellen Werner (albeit a gift that they pay for). “They’re given a summer just to play chamber music.”

In fact, even for a layperson, an evening at Kneisel Hall is pretty intense: an atmosphere of fog and floodlights, music coming from every angle, 50 young players at picnic tables or in studios blearily pondering scores. It’s not uncommon that they break from their assigned pieces, Werner says, by spending the night in the music library and sight-reading other work.

The benefits of such an experience are countless and invaluable, personal as well as musical. “Some of my very closest friends are people I’ve met at Kneisel,” says Bryony Stroud-Watson, who’s about to return for her third summer. A violinist living in Peekskill, New York, she adds that the contacts are important professionally, too: she has been invited to play in a Cleveland new-music festival founded by Kneisel alums.

The musical payoff encompasses everything from minute points of technique and interpretation to sharpening one’s ear. Sebastian Ruth, a violist who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, describes learning a quartet at the IMAI with Martin Storey, an established English cellist. “By the end of the first play-through he’s got a real construction of the score [all four parts] in his head,” Ruth says. “Then he starts making comments about things that I didn’t even hear.”

Eric Rosenblith and his wife, Carol, a soprano and the IMAI’s administrator, make no bones about the institute being a sort of extended musical family with Eric its Old World patriarch. He determines the repertoire and the composition of ensembles, and invites the participants — virtually all of whom are his students, past and present, or his students’ students. Or maybe the family metaphor isn’t so appropriate. “You can call it, if you like, a musical orgy,” Eric jokes.

“One of the really distinguishing features of this festival is the informality of it all,” says Ruth. “It feels like a bunch of friends assembling in Maine to make music.”

Kneisel Hall is more conservative. Not only does it retain the student-teacher distinction, but Artistic Director Seymour Lipkin limits repertoire to strings and piano, where the IMAI brings in winds and voice. At Kneisel, about half of this year’s 50 or so students come from three of America’s swankiest conservatories — the Juilliard School and the Curtis and Cleveland institutes of music. Its faculty boasts similarly lofty credentials, with names like the Juilliard String Quartet and the Metropolitan Opera popping up in the bios.

The faculty is very stable, too. Members include 90-year-old violinist Roman Totenberg and cellist Barbara Stein Mallow, whose mother and uncle were among students that founder Franz Kneisel brought to Blue Hill. Kneisel, founder of America’s first professional string quartet and a Boston Symphony concertmaster, started that practice in 1902, and the current festival compound dates to the 1920s.

The economic contribution that such summer arts programs make is tough to pin down. (Although a look at budgets may tell you something: Kneisel Hall’s is $460,000, the NEMC’s is more than $750,000, and the IMAI’s is just under $60,000.) But the IMAI “helps our economy in every way,” says Barbara Clifford, executive director of the Greater Bridgton Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce, which represents Fryeburg. Not only do resident artists and their families drop money in town, but concerts draw audiences who might dine there, overnight there, perhaps even move there. “People will retire here because they love the concerts,” says Kneisel Hall’s Werner.

Summer arts programs benefit their host communities in ways other than economic, of course. They can help define a region, as the BSMF has certainly done with Brunswick, and they attract other cultural programs. In addition, perhaps aware that they may be perceived as colonies of the well-heeled and well-connected, all three institutes work at community outreach. Their players accompany church services, perform at nursing homes, and do free concerts in nearby towns. The NEMC invites the public to see the work of local artists at its Maine Appreciation Day.

“For the past few years we have been working very hard to bring more people into [the Kneisel Hall] community,” says Werner, just to show them what’s happening. In winter, Kneisel Hall faculty conduct two master classes in Blue Hill; during its regular season, students work with young local musicians at the compound and perform in local schools.

But students from Maine typically don’t pass Kneisel Hall’s stiff entry audition, a reality Werner blames on the state of the state’s music education. Of the three programs, only the NEMC routinely enrolls Maine students — typically around two dozen, with most of the 170 or so other campers coming from the wealthier Northeastern states.

Anyway, the NEMC is a different critter from the IMAI and Kneisel Hall. Founded in the early 1930s as the eastern answer to Interlochen, Michigan’s famed youth camp for the arts, the NEMC was rescued from bankruptcy in 1937 by Dr. Paul Wiggin. Wiggin’s son Davis now runs the facility as a nonprofit. Sited on the shore of Messalonskee Lake, the NEMC puts music at the center of a program that also includes sports, theater, and dance.

“We’re a very nurturing camp,” says Davis Wiggin. The goal is to build self-esteem and self-sufficiency as well as musical ability. “We try to impress upon them the value of being able to do something besides watching TV all the time,” he says. “Up here they find they have to make their own enjoyment, and that is a tremendous growth step.”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.