Summer Vacation

Over the past two weeks I’ve made two visits to the Berkshire hills in western Massachusetts. I traveled with my brother and some friends primarily to attend concerts at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. However, concert-going was not the only event on the agenda. It was a cultural getaway that included touring homes, gardens and art museums as well as the music.
 
Tanglewood is a mostly-outdoor music venue, founded in 1937 on the property of the Tappan family. It takes its name from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Tanglewood Tales,” a collection of stories which he wrote while living in a small house nearby. Plenty of people can attend a concert there: “The Shed,” the popular name for the covered pavilion where the orchestra plays, seats 6,000 people, while another 12,000 can listen from the lawns. Those on the lawns bring “picnics” which consist of tables and chairs, linens, crystal and fine china. We sat under cover to avoid the sun or inclement weather, which was not a problem.
 
The Boston Symphony played the Sunday afternoon concerts, featuring Brahms' 3rd and 4th Symphonies. The featured artist was Yo-Yo Ma, who is, without doubt, the world’s finest Cellist. Monday evenings featured the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, made up of young students and Conductors, with the exception of Conductor Herbert Blomstedt, who is 93 years old and conducts with neither a score nor a baton. The Brahms was beautiful but the Festival Orchestra played Dvorak, Smetana and Vaughn-Williams, all music that enchanted me.
 
In addition to the concerts, we visited The Mount, the home of novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with her book, “The Age of Innocence” which she published in 1921. She wrote 40 books in 40 years. The house is beautiful and well-preserved, though empty, since she took everything with her when she moved to Paris. The formal gardens are incredibly beautiful, my favorite of all we visited. We also visited Naumkeag, the summer home of the Choate family, built in 1887. Joseph H. Choate (1832-1917) was America’s first corporate lawyer, and later Ambassador to England. The house is dark, built in the Shingle style, but furnished with the family’s own belongings. The gardens here are less formal and meandering. Our final garden tour was at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens near Stockbridge. This included farm and home-style gardens as well as formal gardens and an arboretum.
 
In addition to these stops, we attended Mass at the National Shrine of Divine Mercy, visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, had a walkabout in the village of Stockbridge and had dinner one evening at the famous Red Lion Inn, where I had lodged several years ago. We stayed in a B&B Inn just across the state line in New York, so there was plenty of driving between venues and events. The trips were full of events, with little time for reading the book I took along. All in all, I’m happy to be back in my own home and walk about in our own garden. However, I recommend all the above activities for your next vacation.