A craving for music seems to possess the U.S. in the summertime. From coast to coast, Americans brave torrential downpours, smoggy traffic jams, cement seats, grass stains and mosquitoes to get within the sound of music. They seek it out in bosky glens and canopied pavilions, up on mountaintops and down in gulches, in abandoned cow pastures and deserted mining towns, on a riverbank beside a barge and in the middle of a city zoo.
Part rite and part romp, the summer music festival attests the ever-widening U.S. interest in the arts. The quality of performance varies from aspiring and disciplined musicianship to the routine drudging of bored hacks. The classics sometimes share the scene with jazz and folk singing, often done with verve and style. There is even a hot-weather blend of classical and popular that might be dubbed popsical music. Herewith, a sampling of some distinctive U.S. festivals:
∙THE SANTA FE OPERA (June 26-Aug. 24) commands a magnificent site in the foothills of New Mexico's dramatic Sangre de Cristo mountain range. When General Director John Crosby, 36, began the venture in 1957, his Eastern friends told him he was dizzy from the altitude. The skeptics now trek west to see his dizzying success. The present season will see polished performances ranging from Don Giovanni and Madame Butterfly to Honegger's Joan of Arc, combined with a flair for the new. In the much-anticipated American premiere of the late Alban Berg's unfinished, powerful and grittily atonal opera Lulu, Soprano Joan Carroll will sing the dissolute heroine.
Local pride runs so high that Santa Fe citizens account for 70% of the annual ticket sale, and the touristas, as Santa Feans call outlanders, buy the rest. Local taste is also sensitive. A lady once had a cocktail thrown at her at a party for suggesting that the tenor ought to practice more.
∙BERKSHIRE FESTIVAL (July 5-Aug. 25) evokes the shade of the late great Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the initial summer concerts of the Boston Symphony, and of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who once lived in a little red cottage on the edge of the 210-acre estate called Tanglewood. Wrote Hawthorne: "There is a glen between this house and the lake through which winds a little brook with pools, and tiny waterfalls over the great roots of trees . . . Beyond the lake is Monument Mountain, looking like a headless sphinx wrapped in a Persian shawl, when clad in the rich and diversified autumnal foliage of its woods." To the lush beauty of nature, Tanglewood added the spare beauty of modern architecture in 1938 with the 6,037-capacity Music Shed. This is Conductor Erich Leinsdorfs first season in the Shed, and he made his opening-week debut both bold and orthodox by performing a clutch of Mozart concertos and divertimenti never before played at Tanglewood. Says Leinsdorf: "There is nothing wrong in playing Kismet or Rosemarie for a while, but when it becomes a MUST, a forced alternative to digging into the late Beethoven quartets, then we have a big problem."
Bostonian rectitude may account for the absence of any seasonal letdown in the quality of the Boston Symphony. What makes Tanglewood a model festival is that the orchestra's tone and attack are kept as finely manicured as the grounds.