Music

Two more weeks of chamber music and jazz remain in the Music Mountain season, Falls Village’s bucolic concert getaway.
I caught up with the hyperactive artistic director, Oskar Espina-Ruiz, as he was flying back to his home base in North Carolina, where he teaches clarinet in the UNC music school, for a brief stay. He immediately turned his attention to the celebrated American String Quartet, which makes its Music Mountain debut on September 16.

In July, Leonard Bernstein’s most beloved score, “West Side Story,” was performed live by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to accompany a screening of the 1961 movie. The rousing music had its full effect, and gave the amazing Jerome Robbins’ choreography a kick. Also amazing is the technology that stripped only the orchestration from the film, leaving everything else, including the singers’ voices, intact.

Hotchkiss School’s Summer Portals Concert Series returns this year with an impressive lineup of performers and repertory. The concerts, free and open to the public, are part of a summer piano program that brings aspiring young musicians, ages 11-19, from around the world to Hotchkiss for two weeks of intensive lessons, masterclasses, and recitals, under the auspices of a world-class piano faculty.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of legendary composer, conductor, and educator Leonard Bernstein, and like many festivals around the country, Tanglewood is celebrating.
More than most, Tanglewood has a special relationship to Bernstein. Said Tanglewood’s director, Anthony Fogg, “His career virtually began and finished at Tanglewood. He was part of the first class of the Tanglewood Music Center [the training academy] in 1940, working with [famed conductor Serge] Koussevitzky, who founded Tanglewood.”