Miracle in the Berkshires

A magisterial lash of the hand stopped the orchestra. The abashed boy & girl players looked like a tableau of The Damnation of Faust. Said Conductor Koussevitzky: "It doesn't sound." Then he added gently: "But we will arrive. We will arrive."

Serge Koussevitzky had gambled on producing a first-class summer music festival with a student orchestra. By the time he finished his first pair of concerts with the month-old Berkshire Music Center School Orchestra at Lenox, Mass., salvos of applause told him he had succeeded. Critics wired Manhattan newspapers: ". . challenged favorable comparison with the playing of a first-class metropolitan orchestra in its best form"; "a control of tone and dynamics worthy of any major orchestra."

Last week, when the Boston Symphony's maestro led his students through the first U.S. concert performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the orchestra sounded still better, and the critics were still nodding vigorous approval. Koussevitzky had done it again.

Three months ago it seemed hopeless. The swanky Berkshire Symphonic Festival, after much hemming and hawing, had called off its annual summer festival in the western Massachusetts hills. Gas rationing and tire conservation made bucolic concerts risky business. But Conductor Koussevitzky was in a dither--partly at the thought of discontinuing the Berkshire Music School, an annex of the festival, where students learn the arts of conducting, playing, composing and operatic technique. He decided to run the Music Center himself, to put on a symphonic festival without the Boston Symphony.

The school opened last month with 260 students. Koussevitzky's student orchestra consists of 105 boys & girls (average age: 20 years), all technically accomplished players but lacking professional experience. They are coached by a faculty of first-desk Boston Symphony players, but when they play they are on their own. Three hours a day, six days a week, with a few evening hours thrown in, they rehearse under the maestro himself, a genial martinet in an open-neck shirt, slacks and sport shoes, who expects miracles and often gets them.

If the wood winds sound ragged, he stops the players, explains to the culprit that he has been playing piano instead of mezzo forte, achieves on the next try a precise, organlike tone. If the first violins are a hair short of unity, he singles out the lagging fiddler, points out that an improperly held bow is causing his late entrances, illustrates by drawing his baton across his left arm.

Lackadaisical playing enrages him. "You are young," he exclaims, "play it from your heart."

Gradually the amateurish ensemble acquires split-second precision, an incandescent tone, emotional depth. The students, conscious of the miracle happening to them, talk of "Koussie" in awe. Said one: "We're like a Rockne-coached football team. Other teams have coaches who have adopted the Rockne system, but we have Rockne himself."

Koussevitzky's young students also inspire Koussevitzky. When he conducts, he sings, gesticulates, calls his students "my kinder," shows less fatigue than they do at the end of a hard session. Says he: "You know, I have a joy from the rehearsals."

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