A Good Summer Press

The widening circle of repute for the Hopkins Center andits cultural program resulted in visits by a steady stream ofwriters and reviewers during the summer. Following are excerpts from some of their magazine and newspaper articles.

Some of the best summer music being made today can be found in three small towns in New England: at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, in Marlboro, Vermont, and at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, all within a radius of about fifty miles. Concert life of the three areas is individual and markedly different. Tanglewood, with the superb Boston Symphony Orchestra, plays it safe and offers programs practically the same as those given during the orchestra's winter season. The exception of course is the remarkable series of avant-garde programs, sponsored by the Fromm Foundation, beginning in mid-August. Marlboro, with Casals in residence, is preoccupied with the past. But it is Dartmouth which offers the most interesting combination of contemporary and conventional fare. In its new and beautifully designed complex of halls and studios called Hopkins Center, the college has embarked on what it calls a Congregation of the Arts with music under the imaginative direction of Mario di Bonaventura. The current program extends from June 30 to August 21, and revolves around the presence of three distinguished contemporary composers, Ernst Krenek, Zoltan Kodály, and Ross Lee Finney. Unlike Tanglewood, which also has had many distinguished composers-in-residence - but played little of their music - Dartmouth attempts to explore their output in depth and is doing so brilliantly. . . .

The first orchestral concert, on Sunday, July 4, was a neat balance of Krenek, Mozart, and Schuman, conducted by Mario di Bonaventura and Ernst Krenek. The Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra is composed of excellent first-chair players who are faculty members, students, and residents of the local community. While this may label it as semi-professional, it is nevertheless an excellent orchestra that is capable of playing with precision and quality. And Mario di Bonaventura has the makings of a major conductor. . . .

- Oliver Daniel, The Saturday Review

It's called the Dartmouth Congregation of the Arts, which makes it more than a festival and more than a school. Whatever it is, it has definitely put this small, placid Ivy League town on the culture map in this, its third summer.

The impetus for producing a congregation, or get-together, where professionals in art, drama and music could display their wares and rub shoulders with students and each other, came about through the completion of Dartmouth's Hopkins Center, a sort of Lincoln-Center-under-one-roof, in 1962....

The results, three years later, are impressive. During the eight-week season, three of the world's major composers have been in residence to supervise performances of some of their most important scores; a drama company is producing a season of masterworks by Shakespeare, Shaw and Moliere; nine traveling art exhibitions have been booked for the center's gallery; while on "off-nights" there is a festival of movie masterpieces from the past (the likes of Bette Davis' "The Little Foxes," unseen in New York for years)....

The musical program is administered by Mario di Bonaventura, director of music at the college. A conductor of international renown, he also is known here as a remarkably able administrator. For the musical forces he has scoured up a score of notable first-desk players from around the country, setting them in the midst of some 80 student players and somehow hammering together a solid, professional-sounding orchestra in practically no time.

- Alan Rich, New York Herald Tribune

At Hanover, N. H., the Dartmouth Repertory Theater Company is preparing to open a new season Thursday evening with nine professional actors and actresses from New York and 24 student players chosen from various colleges of the country, in the first of three great plays.

This is the third year for the Dartmouth College company, which serves not only the students of the summer session but also the New Hampshire and Vermont communities. But it is the first time the college has hired enough pros to win a rating from the Actor's Equity Association and, at the same time, to do adequately what the troupe is required to do. None of these pros is a star. Most are known to the public of Boston and Broadway only in roles of lesser consequence. But they are all young, competent and personable. They are young enough to be able to work congenially with students, competent enough to fit into the Dartmouth community.... Professor Clancy, who will direct two of the three plays of this Dartmouth season, does the casting in New York. He selects the actors. For his tact and talent there should be some sort of special award.

For Dartmouth, there should be praise, too. In this project, the college is serving the theater of Northern New England, bringing great plays in commendable productions to thousands of men and women who wouldn't otherwise have a chance to see them. At the same time, it is bridging the gap between the academic and the professional theaters, and so strengthening both.

- Elliot Norton, Boston Record-American

A cheering audience gave Zoltan Kodály a standing ovation Sunday following a concert performance of his 1932 opera "Spinnstube." The 82-year-old Hungarian composer is at Dartmouth this summer as a composer in residence during the college's third annual Congregation of the Arts....

It was touching to see the frail figure of Kodály, with his white beard and long white hair, spring to the stage to bow with the soloists. Soft-spoken and serious, he has produced some passionately eloquent music.

The concert was one of 17 being given this summer as part of the Theater Art Film and Music Festival that Dartmouth calls the Congregation of the Arts. It was conducted by Mario di Bonaventura, the musical director of the Hopkins Center here, who has worked some minor miracles in whipping the mostly student orchestra and chorus into shape. It was Mr. di Bonaventura who not only planned the entire festival but who also got Kodaly to come to the United States for it. Dartmouth can be proud of its series and its director. He has done us all a service both for his fine imaginative planning and for delivering the goods in sound.

- Howard Klein, The New York Times

Set amidst the vastly rolling hills of New Hampshire, just across the border and not a stone's throw from the seemingly endless valleys of Vermont, lies Hanover, Dartmouth College and, above all, the Hopkins Center. Now, Hanover is a small town, Dartmouth College is what you would expect it to be, and the Hopkins Center, named after the former principal of the College, is the most splendid agora of the arts yet devised by man. . . .

It is in this particular centre of the arts that a young Canadian actor, known more or less well across the country and very well indeed in Eastern Canada, Louis Turenne, is playing his first Richard II. Those who have seen Mr. Turenne in any of his various theatre and TV appearances have had no doubt that here was an actor of quality, one who knew what he was about and who was quite certain that he knew what the theatre was about and what it was for. By that curious irony of which most of us are either uncomfortably or indignantly aware, it is in the United States, south of our famously undefended border, that Mr. Turenne has finally been given the opportunity to jump through the hoop of trial, and essay a Shakespearean leading character. And he lands most felicitously upon the other side....

Not much later in the season, two more plays go onto the boards - Shaw's "The Doctor's Dilemma" and an adaptation into English of Molière's "Tartuffe," after which the three will be played in repertory, a la Stratford. Try to go, for it is an experience which you will not wish to forget.

- Peter Symcox, Montreal Star

My musing colleague, Mephisto, got in a crack awhile back about the particular form of galloping culturitis that inspires the construction of multi-million-dollar arts centers in the most remarkable places; every month turns up a press release or two heralding triumphant new architectural complexes in places like Attu or Point Barrow or Parris Island, where they will have few performances to house and fewer people to attend them, but where they will provide a couple of years' work for the local construction trade, another term of office for some fading municipal politicians, and a Point of Interest and Proof of Civilization for the Junior Chamber of Commerce members to yammer about at visiting journalists and state assemblymen.

There is an exception: Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. It is used. . . .

I visited Hanover during the first week in July, when Krenek was The Big Wheel on Campus. His compositions dominated the chamber and orchestral concerts given during the period of his stay, and in a series of lectures he explicated his methods of composition to large audiences of attentive music students and resident musicians.... The chamber concert of July 7 was all-Krenek. The Fibonacci-Mobile, played by pianists Anthony di Bonaventura and Martin Canin and by the Dartmouth String Quartet (Stuart Canin, David Cerone, Ralph Hersh, Paul Olefsky) was, to report my own reaction, a terrible bore - the discarded hubcaps and soup cans of music, clonking about in first one juxtaposition, then another. But there was also Krenek's String Quartet No. 7, Op. 96, composed during the war - composed, I say. It seemed to me one of the finest of all pieces of modern chamber music, melodically inventive and most thoroughly worked. It was beautifully performed, as was, indeed, everything else on the program.... Krenek himself acted as conductor and as "coordinator" for the F.M., and certainly seemed to know what he was about. The lovely brick-walled concert hall, acoustically quite splendid, at least for this sort of music, housed a near-capacity audience, and a thoroughly intelligent, attentive one. Could we, I wonder, fill Town Hall for an all-Krenek evening of chamber music?

- Conrad Osborne, Musical America

Les quatre solistes - Canadiens et Américaines - ont eu leur heure de gloire lors de l'exécution du Te Deum de Kodaly. Un choeur de 200 voix donnait a l'oeuvre toute sa dimension, mais les artistes ne se sont détendus qu'en entendant les "bravo, bravo" chaleureux de l'auteur qui les félicitait. Pour beaucoup de spectateurs, ce concert - qui comprenait en outre les "Danses de Galanta" de Kodaly et le Concerto No. 2 pour piano et orchestre de Bartok - marquait une apothéose et pouvait difficilement etre supassé.

- Lily Tasso, La Presse, Montreal

The steady upgrading of the musical resources of such polar institutions as Stanford and Dartmouth, as well as many others in between, suggests the possibility that new rungs are being formed in the ladder of American operatic experience from the studio to the summit. This is not necessarily best served by the importation of a company of specialists from Italy, but they do embody a power of example for the native performer as well as listener. ... It is not in the least debatable that such ventures as the Stanford Summer Festival no less than Dartmouth's "Congregation" have a new, exciting relevance to the artistic scene as a whole in America. They proceed from accessible physical assets to recognizable programs funded by estimable amounts of underwriting committed to broadly "educational" objectives. This may not add up exactly to the Weimar Court Theater of 1850, or Munich under Ludwig II, but it suggests a characteristically American adaptation to a perennial problem - namely, how to help pay for what cannot pay for itself.

- Irving Kolodin, The Saturday Review

The atmosphere at the Dartmouth College Congregation of the Arts is uncommonly attractive. The title is really the only pretentious thing in an otherwise thoroughly purposeful, intelligent and imaginative activity.

There are chamber concerts every Wednesday and orchestral concerts every Sunday, and the summer's musical program is organized about the presence of selected composersin-residence who in the past have included Carter, Cowell, Persichetti, and Piston. This year, Mario di Bonaventura, the director of music and an impressively serious and vigorous musician, has invited Ernst Krenek, who is about to finish a fortnight's residence; as well as Zoltan Kodály and Ross Lee Finney who are to follow later.

The Krenek evening was especially telling because of the perspective provided by hearing a whole group of his works. In another way it was particularly telling also because of the impressively high performance standards. This is a deplorably rare phenomenon in contemporary music, and it is a pleasure to report that the members of the Dartmouth Wind Quintet (Harriet Edwards, Alfred Genovese, Donald Wendlandt, Howard Hillyer, Crawford Best), the Dartmouth String Quartet (Stuart Canin, David Cerone, Ralph Hersh, Paul Olefsky), and pianists Martin Canin and Anthony di Bonaventura, all did superb work.

A large audience attended, impressively larger, for example, than the one that the Princeton community was able to produce for a free concert in honor of Roger Sessions, and it was a good audience too. This also is a tribute to the confidence the Arts Congregation has earned in the community.

- Michael Steinberg, The Boston Globe