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PrintMountains Plus Mozart
Grand Teton Music Festival players say summer camp atmosphere inspires them to greatness
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Ah, summer camp! Hiking and swimming and canoeing and star-gazing. Making new friends and reuniting with friends made last year. Maybe a little romance or mischief. And, of course, sitting around the campfire singing songs.
Teton Village is headquarters to such a summer camp, except in this case the campers are professional classical musicians from around the country. They hike in the Tetons, splash in the Snake and stand agog before the spectacle of Nature with a capital “N.” They make new friends and catch up with old ones. Romance and mischief certainly are not unheard of.
But it’s their unique version of the campfire sing-along that’s the main event.
This summer, as in the previous forty-eight summers, 200 musicians will accept an invitation to perform orchestral and chamber music in Walk Festival in Teton Village. Among the best players in the world, some will come for a week or two, others for the entire seven weeks. For some, the 2009 festival will be their first; others are veterans of twenty, thirty, forty summers or more.
“We climb mountains, paddle rapids, run races, come face-to-face with wildlife, find seclusion,” said violinist Jennifer Ross, who has referred to the festival as “summer camp for adults” since her first visit twenty-nine years ago. The result is “a group of pumped-up, high-on-life, endorphin-happy musicians.”
Cellist Barrett Sills took a tandem paraglider flight off the top of 10,450-foot Rendezvous Peak in 2002, then took up the sport on his own. Violinist Gregory Fulkerson is one of a number of fairly serious climbers in the bunch. And Music Director Donald Runnicles can often be spotted bicycling to rehearsals, and has been known to enjoy the slopes when visiting during the winter.
“When my children were younger, we did a lot of horseback riding and whitewater rafting trips,” said eighteen-year GTMF veteran Gail Williams, a French horn player with the Chicago Chamber Musicians. “When I turned 50, I climbed the Grand … and I’ve done the Crest Trail,” a thirty-nine-mile backcountry route that stretches from Teton Pass to String Lake in the heart of Grand Teton National Park. “A number of us are going to do that again this summer.”
That time with friends also keeps participants coming back.
“I count on seeing my camp friends every summer,” said Ross, who plays with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra the rest of the year. “We stay in touch during the year, we e-mail plans for hikes, we reserve favorite camping sites, we scour maps to find new places to fish. … I swear the anticipation is half the fun.”
