Little Berkshire Festival

If you ask the average non-musical man, symphonies and operas are bad enough, but chamber music is the limit. The musically-minded are apt to consider chamber music the limit too, but in a different sense. Most of it is written for string quartet (two violins, viola, cello), a combination of instruments supposed to be unequaled for balance and flexibility. Most of the great symphonists have written chamber music as well as symphonies, and sometimes connoisseurs have rated their chamber music higher than the rest. When German Historian Oswald Spengler was casting gloomily about for the No. 1 artistic achievement of Western civilization, his slightly decayed palm was finally bestowed on the string quartets, not the symphonies, of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Only a small minority of concertgoers are chamber-music fans. But, like most minorities, they are dogged. Among the most tenacious of the lot is Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a portly, good-natured, partly-deaf widow who spends her summers near Pittsfield, Mass. Twenty years ago, when the World War was at its peak.

Widow Coolidge assembled a congress of chamber musicians at her South Mountain estate in the Berkshires. This get-together became an annual event, the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, attracted visitors from all over the U. S.

Last week chamber-music alligators from far & near gathered again at South Mountain to celebrate the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival's 20th anniversary. Participating were twelve of the world's best-known chamber-music players, the famed Roth, Gordon and Kolisch Quartets. On the list of new quartets and quintets to be chambered were recent works by U. S. Composers Frederick Jacobi and Louis Gruenberg, Austrian Composers Ernst Toch and Anton von Webern, British Composer Frank Bridge.

Before the last concert had taken place, Pittsfield was hit by the worst wind and rain storm in local history. Outside the little white auditorium, like a chambered nautilus, the hurricane howled. But to chamber-music fans, storms are merely a loud noise. When the lights went out, they rigged up light for the musicians from an automobile battery, listened away in the dark.

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