Tanglewood, U.S.A.

Dr. Serge Koussevitzky was in his favorite summer pasture last week, and frisky as a yearling. His costume--grey flannel trousers, blue flannel jacket, white wool beret and white shoes--made him look like a jaunty boulevardier at the beach. Visitors to Tanglewood, Dr. Koussevitzky's music colony near Lenox, Mass., try to compliment the maestro by calling it "an American Salzburg."

Maestro Koussevitzky thinks it no compliment. He bangs an angry, sunburned fist down on his piano. "Why a Salzburg?" he snaps. "Let's have courage to say it. In early stages Salzburg was ideal place--now it is the most commercialized thing you can imagine. Most people who come to Salzburg are snobs who come to say they have been in Salzburg. They must rehearse too quick, in a week, maybe less. Why not a Tanglewood, U.S.A.? We play here something that is more perfect than ever a performance in Salzburg. To make great art great artists have to rehearse."

Mountain Music. Outside and in a dozen nearby buildings, girls in slacks and boys in basque shirts scraped, fiddled, blew, banged and sang, and the noises elbowed each other like a musical Babel. Behind a boxed hemlock hedge a soprano and contralto sang a duet from Aida, beyond another hedge a section of cellos rehearsed the minuet from Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 in F Major. In the Music Shed on the greensward a Brazilian conductor, who spoke no English, sign-signaled a student orchestra through a too-briskly gaited Afternoon of a Faun. Koussevitzky observed: "Maybe fine conductor for Brazilian music but he needs to be teached to change approach for European music." In Tanglewood's garage, a 40-member four-part chorus, struggling through a Hindemith chanson, was having soprano trouble. Conductor Robert Shaw pleaded: "No, girls, Wa ta is so wrong. Listen to the way the tenors do it ... I want just a great big C sharp."

In the valley below Tanglewood's Victorian-gabled main house, Guernsey cows grazed amiably around the dairy barn. In the barn stalls a pianist raced through the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C Major; in the hayloft upstairs a madrigal group worked over Purcells 17th-Century masque opera, King Arthur. Somewhere in a clump of birch a lone flutist piped the theme of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe. Down by the shores of inky Lake Mahkeenac, a brass section blared Moussorgsky's A Night on Bald Mountain, and inside the lakeside clubhouse 23-year-old Composer Lukas Foss, a Koussevitzky favorite, beat out a frenzied boogie-woogie.

All This and Premieres Too. Tanglewood, a 210-acre estate which Nathaniel Hawthorne used as a setting for his Tanglewood Tales, was given to the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936. Two years later some of Koussevitzky's admirers built the Shed, an $80,000 fan-shaped acoustical dream.

For the Music Center's first season after a three-year war layoff, Koussevitzky & staff have handpicked 410 musicians, the majority under 30, from the U.S., Latin America and Canada. The summer's $100,000 budget is paid off by tuition fees (averaging $120 a student), ticket sales to festival concerts, and gifts. More than 100 students are there under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Aaron Copland, Koussevitzky's assistant director, trains eight young composers. Koussevitzky himself teaches three people how to conduct. At weekend concerts he listens carefully to their conducting efforts. Says he: "I see if they adopt what I tell them or whether they not. Then we begin again."

Next week, Tanglewood and its neighboring villages of Lenox and Stockbridge will be crammed with visitors anxious to hear what the rehearsing was about. They will hear the 110-man Boston Symphony Orchestra in nine concerts. U.S. premieres: Dmitri Shostakovich's new and brief (25-minute) Ninth Symphony, which Koussevitzky enthusiastically describes as "absolutely classic in form until sometimes it is very near to Haydn," and Peter Grimes, a widely touted opera in English by England's Benjamin Britten, commissioned by Koussevitzky and first played in London in 1945. The student production will be conducted by Leonard Bernstein, most famous of Koussevitzky's bright young men.

Dr. Koussevitzky, who will be 72 next week, is as full of energy--and superlatives--as ever. Says he: "At Tanglewood we will have all the great writers and artists and musicians working together. We will compose tragedies of our life in the Greek manner. In America today we have tragedies not less than the Greeks."

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