A Breathtaking Music Camp Finale!

If I let my imagination run wild, I would frame this writing around Robin Hood...

The backdrop was the Merrywood Music Camp, nestled in the Berkshires in a dense forest where a friendly outlaw could easily have robbed from the rich in Lenox, and then retreated into the pines, practically unnoticed.

Merrywood was a stone’s throw from Tanglewood, home of the well-established music festival. The camp owner, Ruth Hurwitz, who resided for most of the year in upscale West Hartford, Connecticut brought a contingent of Hartt School of Music students and teachers to her rustic summer sanctuary where she housed two dozen or so campers in a three-story abode with a well utilized attic space. The place resembled a college co-op like the one I’d remembered from my Oberlin days. May Cottage, my Frosh digs had the same look with an added roomy basement that gave refuge during tornado warnings.

Merrywood’s space accommodated rows of cots on the two highest floors and down below in the living room was a grand piano, a quaint fireplace, and a Bay window with a view of the magnificent wooded landscape. A stone’s throw from the property, James Stagliano, Principal French hornist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra serenaded neighbors with his mid-morning horn calls, when otherwise in the ranks of the orchestra, rumor had it he took a swig of spirits from the brass instrument itself.

Campers were awakened promptly at 6:00 a.m. to a blasting Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 piped into rooms on insensitively loud speakers. Jarred out of their sleep, kids aged 9 to 17, were conditioned to revile otherwise heavenly music.

By a strange quirk of fate, I was selected to play the last movement of this very Brandenburg 5 (piano part–really meant for the harpsichord) at the final concert concluding camp. The Allegro in 2/4 meter, laden with triplets and tricky rests in between, was a challenge to count, and my first entrance of the subject, imitated by a violinist, flautist, and the whole ensemble, was a tricky undertaking. All I  remember was fumbling when my motif returned one last time before the culminating cadence. Before I knew it, the whole composition folded like a house of cards.

As the music came to a grinding halt, I could hear conductor, “Neil,” a Harvard grad student in Musicology, whisper the clearly articulated words, “Back to the recapitulation.”

My heart was racing. Could I calm my nerves enough to accurately count beats leading to my encore entrance? The music had already re-started with a string of triplet eighth notes that flew by like a cyclone. In a frenzy, I couldn’t keep up with the brisk pace, not recalling what I had rehearsed for weeks.

In a state of panic, I thought about a racing car driver making a death-defying turn, as I braced myself, skirting into the ensemble like an automobile that barely managed a tricky merger on a congested three-lane highway.

I made it! and the chamber group held itself together to the final resonating chord.

The ordeal was over, resolved, put into the past tense until the evening when it was painfully revisited. After campers had gorged themselves on barbecued franks, baked beans, and s’mores (chocolate wrapped marshmallows with graham crackers roasted on a stick) the faculty presented an improvised skit, highlighting the summer’s events.

Right on the front burner was “Back to the Recapitulation,” repeated several times over, earning a ripple of applause amidst a good share of chuckles. Right then and there I experienced a flush of embarrassment, and departed camp feeling like a social outcast.

I never returned to Merrywood after my ill-fated performance, but I would always cherish memories of Stagliano’s horn calls; Sunday morning trips to BSO rehearsals with Charles Munch at the helm; pint size, guest conductor, Pierre Monteux climbing up to the podium to conduct the War of 1812 Overture; Isaac Stern playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, with tears rolling down his cheeks; Lukas Foss, pianist, rendering a magnificent performance of Bach’s D minor concerto, and Eugene Lehner, principal violist, coaching our string quartet, during my years studying violin.

Not to forget a very memorable field trip to nearby Stockbridge where Merrywooders met artist, Norman Rockwell who gave campers a personal tour of his home. It was filled with magnificent paintings, some of which graced the covers of the Saturday Evening Post.

Finally, if there are any music campers still around and kicking, please rekindle memories of that Brandenburg summer or any others you may recall. Facebook has lost track of us, and since Ruth Hurwitz’s passing, we must come out of the woodwork and find each other.