Brevard Music Center 2005 – 69th Season
Brevard Music Center can lay claim as one of the leading summer orchestral music festivals. Held in the shadow of North Carolina’s famous Blue Ridge range, it has an open-sided 1,800 seat performance venue (or you can sit on the lawn), enrollment at 400+ students from forty states and ten countries, eighty concerts including vocal, chamber, concerti, symphony, and complete opera performances, a teaching faculty of sixty internationally-acclaimed performers and teachers, a string of front-rank guest headliners, a physical plant of 140 acres embracing 145 buildings and lakes and fifty support staff just to keep the place going, plus a heritage at this site dating to 1945 and bragging rights back to 1936. It’s the Real Deal!
Hey! It’s MozartiumAspenTangleBayreuth all in one big package!
Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder ripped up the place on June 17 to get everyone’s attention. It wasn’t exactly like The Who and Tanglewood, but they at least took the cue. Emmylou Harris will appear July 12. The season opens on June 25 and lists “festive fare” programming that includes the Pendergrast Family, Broadway favorites, and the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble – which is really just a bunch of guys who stay up late but wanted to play straight gigs… – you know, to inspire the kids and pass on the juice so to speak… – so they had their picture taken dressed in tuxedos.
The big classical acts are Frederica von Stade, Joshua Bell, Keith Lockhart (a BMC alum), percussionist Timothy Adams, pianist Jon Nakamatsu, violinist David Brickman, Preucil and Rowe, the Díaz Trio, the Miami String Quartet, and violist Miles Hoffman. BMC will also stage four operatic productions, one every two weeks; Barber of Seville, H.M.S. Pinafore, Sweeney Todd, and Verdi’s Rigoletto.
Mixed in and around are numerous student solo, chamber, and wind ensemble recitals, faculty programs, lectures before operas and concerts, moonlight concerts, a young person’s concert, three orchestras, two band ensembles, piano, composition, and jazz recitals, BMC Orchestra programs, two mysterious groups called Transylvania Symphony Orchestra and I Solisti di Brevard (please!), and a piano competition. (Right, I want my teenager more nervous!)
Outstanding management has kept this legendary summer camp and performance series operational through thick, thin, lean, and plenty. The organization’s 501(c)3 status dates back to 1947, the current annual budget exceeds $2M, and the place has operated in the black every year since 1978 – remarkable when you consider even minimum maintenance costs, and they’ve been able to make improvements and add facilities. Last year’s endowment figure was $4.6M, and all of that is directed exclusively to support student scholarships.
It’s no accident the festival is located in western North Carolina: the roots extend to Davidson College and a man named James Christian Pfohl (pronounced “Fole”). During WWII, he started a summer camp for boys, later moved to the campus of Queens College in Charlotte as a co-educational program and then established in Brevard as the Transylvania Music Camp in 1945. From there, success has been a matter of good management and steady conviction.
For the student vocalist or orchestral instrument player, this is one of the major places to be during summer. No, it’s not the Alps or the Grand Tetons, but we can’t afford that so get over it. It’s hot and humid, you sleep in a fifty-year-old cabin with three tuba players and with breeze and rain blowing through the screens, your instrument goes out of tune every ten minutes, the faculty is underpaid and cranky, it’s fifteen-hour days of relentless practicing, the food is… well, it’s there…, and your laundry comes back as socks. Left socks.
Wanna be a musician? Here’s your chance to experience the life.
For details, see our summer festivals tab [inactive 11/05].
Roger A. Cope