Maverick Concerts, America’s oldest continuous summer chamber music festival and winner of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, thrives on the love of great music and the spirit of its unique site in the unspoiled woods. The rustic 1916 concert hall, with its perfect acoustics, is ideally suited to chamber music and the intimacy of live performance.

Maverick Concerts continues the vision of Hervey White, founder of the collaborative Maverick Art Colony. Artists and other volunteers built the hand-hewn “music chapel” in 1916 and the Hall is now a multi-starred attraction on the National Register of Historic Places.

click here for Maverick's Young People's Concerts Trio Solisti

the Hall photographed at dusk by Simon Russell

FROM MUSIC DIRECTOR ALEXANDER PLATT:

2012: Tour de France: Celebrating the anniversaries of Debussy, Ravel and Philip Glass A summer at the Maverick Concerts Festival is always a season of celebrations, and 2012 will be no exception. This year, we take a Tour de France inspired by important commemorations for two of the very greatest French composers: the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy and the 75th anniversary of the death of Maurice Ravel. We also celebrate that honorary Parisian, our own Philip Glass, who turns 75 this year. We focus on their music in a way that combines old and new, familiar and forgotten, with their works performed by brilliant artists from around the world. The bedrock of the festival is an extensive survey of this and other music performed by eminent musicians who return each season to our unique, historic music chapel. The hall reopens following extensive restoration and improvements made this winter, thanks to our many generous friends and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and Save America’s Treasures, administered by the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior. We again welcome the Tokyo, Shanghai, Ebène, Leipzig and Amernet quartets, as well as the Imani Winds and Trio Solisti. Other returning artists include cellist Zuill Bailey and violinist Tim Fain and singers Nancy Allen Lundy and Andrew Garland. We again welcome pianists Navah Perlman, Frederick Chiu, Andrew Russo, Alan Murchie, Ilya Yakushev and Pedja Muzijevic, along with bansuri bamboo flute master Steve Gorn. As always, we have invited artists who are new to the Maverick, including the Jupiter Quartet, Latitude 41 piano trio and sopranos Mary Nessinger and Gaële Le Roi. Also joining us for the first time will be acclaimed Four Nations Ensemble with harpsichordist Andrew Appel. Maverick continues to emphasize the importance of jazz in the world of contemporary music. For our “Jazz at the Maverick” series I have invited acclaimed pianist Bill Charlap to return with Renee Rosnes for a special night of two jazz pianos. The great Fred Hersch also will join us again, and Woodstock guitarist Perry Beekman and friends return to celebrate the words and music of Cole Porter. The Ebène Quartet will give a Saturday evening concert of contemporary jazz as well as a Sunday afternoon classical chamber concert. A high point of the summer, in what has become a Maverick tradition, is the annual chamber orchestra concert, this year celebrating La Bonne Chanson; we will offer vocal gems by Debussy, Ravel and Gabriel Fauré, along with the world premiere of a new work by Harold Meltzer, written for soprano Mary Nessinger and made possible by a grant from the Fromm Foundation. The festival has been extended into September this year, and the Maverick’s final concert will be given by our great friends the Tokyo String Quartet on the 16th. In recognition of the historic cultural legacy of the Maverick Colony, the exciting Actors and Writers theater company once again will present an original theatrical piece to begin the season. And we are delighted to offer four Young People’s Concerts, including the triumphant return of Elizabeth Mitchell and Family. I look forward to the great pleasure of welcoming you to our 2012 celebration of Music in the Woods!

Alexander Platt