Flux Quartet playing at Bargemusic on Brooklyn waterfront.
Summer used to be an off time for classical music and jazz. Now, the summer festivals that dot America’s countryside between June and Labor Day are cornerstones of the musical year. Many jazz musicians earn half or more of their incomes at summer fests. The crunch plaguing jazz clubs is balanced by summer’s tents and amphitheaters. European summers have enjoyed a busy classical music scene since the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, busy summers became part and parcel of America’s rising international eminence in classical music.
The Hudson Valley, and the wider surrounding watershed feeding the Hudson River, was the pioneering American region, and still the national leader of this intensive summer music-making.
Let’s start with what’s literally the southern anchor of performing arts venues along the Hudson River and its estuary: Bargemusic, at the mouth of Inner New York City Harbor. This renovated old coffee barge, tied up along a Brooklyn pier, is an eminent year-round national venue for chamber music. The pace picks up even more during the summer, with daily concerts and a free noon series for children that builds classical music audiences for the future.
In terms of local economic development, Bargemusic is a shining instance of the role an arts project can play in revitalizing neighborhoods that fall on hard times. When the renovated barge anchored itself to the old pier in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) 33 years ago, the area was in sorry shape. The increasing flow of chamber music enthusiasts to this unusual venue was an important catalyst in fostering the restaurants, high tech offices, arts workshops and residential buildings that increasingly line DUMBO’s streets.
The northern Valley anchor, in terms of a major venue, is the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. SPAC has two centerpieces: first, the country’s major dance ensemble, the New York City Ballet; second, the summer residency of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which looks forward to many good years with its newly appointed young conductor, Montréal’s brilliant Yannick Nézét-Séguin.
Special mention goes to the northern musical presence closest to the Hudson’s source in Lake Tear of the Clouds: opera and musicals at the Seagle Music Colony in Schroon Lake.
Glimmerglass Opera, photo by Claire McAdams
The eastern anchor, Tanglewood, synergizes the great Boston Symphony Orchestra, a premier program for training young professionals and networks of complimentary Berkshire cultural organizations established in Tanglewood’s wake.
The western anchor, Cooperstown, hosts America’s premier summer opera venue, Glimmerglass. Cooperstown, strictly speaking, lies shortly west of the Hudson River watershed boundary. In terms of arts demographics, it is part of a vibrant Greater Albany cultural region, and a regular destination for people from Greater New York and Greater Boston.
Artistically, Glimmerglass played and plays a double role: in addition to the standard repertoire that continues to fill opera houses, it takes interesting risks by featuring new opera and also re-acquaints people with the glories of early era opera. Like Tanglewood, Glimmerglass created a ranking program for training young professionals, both as singers and in the backstage crafts necessary to make opera work.
The Mid-Hudson anchor is the Bard Music Festival, now entering its twenty-first year as a major event of the New York music season, summer or winter. The outstanding acoustics in the Fisher Center’s concert hall match the unique imagination of the Center’s internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Gehry. That’s no accident: Gehry’s passion for music runs deep. He pays as much attention to how his halls sound as how they look — glorious.
From the jazz angle, there’s another surprising new Mid-Hudson anchor: a class-A jazz club, The Falcon, sitting in the small village of Marlboro north of Newburgh. Top-of-the-line jazz musicians from the Big Apple have fallen in love with Tony Falco’s audacious startup of a jazz club in a building that began life as a 19th century button factory. The original wooden floors and cathedral ceiling create warm and pleasing acoustics.
Hudson Valley resident Roswell Rudd, winner of 2010 Downbeat Critics Poll as top jazz trombonist, at the Caramoor Jazz Festival.
The Caramoor Festival in northern Westchester County is the Lower Hudson’s musical anchor before arriving, of course, in America’s musical nerve center, Manhattan. Bucolic Caramoor is the summer home for Carnegie Hall’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a Bel Canto era opera and exceptional jazz festival in the ambience of a grand early 20th century estate that was, after the entrepreneur-owner’s son perished in the trench slaughter of World War I, deeded to a non-profit arts foundation.
“New York’s Sixth Borough” is the nickname that musicians have attached to the Hudson Valley north of the city proper. The selected highlights above are just that: the peaks of a wide musical landscape. A significant fraction of New York’s musical talent now live in the greater Hudson Valley and its watershed, and commute into the city during the regular music season. When things heat up during summer, however, more of the performance scene shifts to the countryside and small towns of the Valley.
Professor Philip Ehrensaft taught at l’Université du Québec à Montréal before moving to the Hudson Valley to direct Metro Countryside Research and pursue a parallel career in music journalism.
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Flux Quartet playing at Bargemusic on Brooklyn waterfront.
Summer used to be an off time for classical music and jazz. Now, the summer festivals that dot America’s countryside between June and Labor Day are cornerstones of the musical year. Many jazz musicians earn half or more of their incomes at summer fests. The crunch plaguing jazz clubs is balanced by summer’s tents and amphitheaters. European summers have enjoyed a busy classical music scene since the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, busy summers became part and parcel of America’s rising international eminence in classical music.
The Hudson Valley, and the wider surrounding watershed feeding the Hudson River, was the pioneering American region, and still the national leader of this intensive summer music-making.
Let’s start with what’s literally the southern anchor of performing arts venues along the Hudson River and its estuary: Bargemusic, at the mouth of Inner New York City Harbor. This renovated old coffee barge, tied up along a Brooklyn pier, is an eminent year-round national venue for chamber music. The pace picks up even more during the summer, with daily concerts and a free noon series for children that builds classical music audiences for the future.
In terms of local economic development, Bargemusic is a shining instance of the role an arts project can play in revitalizing neighborhoods that fall on hard times. When the renovated barge anchored itself to the old pier in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) 33 years ago, the area was in sorry shape. The increasing flow of chamber music enthusiasts to this unusual venue was an important catalyst in fostering the restaurants, high tech offices, arts workshops and residential buildings that increasingly line DUMBO’s streets.
The northern Valley anchor, in terms of a major venue, is the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. SPAC has two centerpieces: first, the country’s major dance ensemble, the New York City Ballet; second, the summer residency of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which looks forward to many good years with its newly appointed young conductor, Montréal’s brilliant Yannick Nézét-Séguin.
Special mention goes to the northern musical presence closest to the Hudson’s source in Lake Tear of the Clouds: opera and musicals at the Seagle Music Colony in Schroon Lake.
Glimmerglass Opera, photo by Claire McAdams
The eastern anchor, Tanglewood, synergizes the great Boston Symphony Orchestra, a premier program for training young professionals and networks of complimentary Berkshire cultural organizations established in Tanglewood’s wake.
The western anchor, Cooperstown, hosts America’s premier summer opera venue, Glimmerglass. Cooperstown, strictly speaking, lies shortly west of the Hudson River watershed boundary. In terms of arts demographics, it is part of a vibrant Greater Albany cultural region, and a regular destination for people from Greater New York and Greater Boston.
Artistically, Glimmerglass played and plays a double role: in addition to the standard repertoire that continues to fill opera houses, it takes interesting risks by featuring new opera and also re-acquaints people with the glories of early era opera. Like Tanglewood, Glimmerglass created a ranking program for training young professionals, both as singers and in the backstage crafts necessary to make opera work.
The Mid-Hudson anchor is the Bard Music Festival, now entering its twenty-first year as a major event of the New York music season, summer or winter. The outstanding acoustics in the Fisher Center’s concert hall match the unique imagination of the Center’s internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Gehry. That’s no accident: Gehry’s passion for music runs deep. He pays as much attention to how his halls sound as how they look — glorious.
From the jazz angle, there’s another surprising new Mid-Hudson anchor: a class-A jazz club, The Falcon, sitting in the small village of Marlboro north of Newburgh. Top-of-the-line jazz musicians from the Big Apple have fallen in love with Tony Falco’s audacious startup of a jazz club in a building that began life as a 19th century button factory. The original wooden floors and cathedral ceiling create warm and pleasing acoustics.
Hudson Valley resident Roswell Rudd, winner of 2010 Downbeat Critics Poll as top jazz trombonist, at the Caramoor Jazz Festival.
The Caramoor Festival in northern Westchester County is the Lower Hudson’s musical anchor before arriving, of course, in America’s musical nerve center, Manhattan. Bucolic Caramoor is the summer home for Carnegie Hall’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a Bel Canto era opera and exceptional jazz festival in the ambience of a grand early 20th century estate that was, after the entrepreneur-owner’s son perished in the trench slaughter of World War I, deeded to a non-profit arts foundation.
“New York’s Sixth Borough” is the nickname that musicians have attached to the Hudson Valley north of the city proper. The selected highlights above are just that: the peaks of a wide musical landscape. A significant fraction of New York’s musical talent now live in the greater Hudson Valley and its watershed, and commute into the city during the regular music season. When things heat up during summer, however, more of the performance scene shifts to the countryside and small towns of the Valley.