Hayley Benton

hbenton@citizen-times.com

BREVARD - As the light begins to fade, the music begins. Soft at first, a crescendo builds with the addition of each new instrument — light timpani percussion, a soloist on upright bass. Strings join section by section, followed by the warmth of woodwind.

The sounds of summer evenings infiltrate the silences left by the symphony — the chirping of crickets, the rustle of leaves, the tap-tap-tap of rain falling over the Pisgah National Forest.

Some nights, artistic director Keith Lockhart leads the orchestra, performing on stage at the Brevard Music Center. He eyes each section from his rostrum, commanding the tempo. The volume and intensity follow his wave of constant motion. An alumnus of the institute, Lockhart conducts both the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Boston Pops when he's not directing the 200-plus orchestra students at BMC.

"Several years ago, someone told me about a Mahler piece Keith was directing. They said it's not to be missed," said Karen Tessier, president of Market Connections and fan of the music center. "So I went to this concert by myself. It was a very hot night — so hot that I remember Keith's black shirt was stuck to his body — and there were lightning bugs above people's heads in the audience.

"I was crying by the end of that performance," Tessier said. "I drove back to Asheville sobbing because I don’t think I’d ever heard anything more beautiful. When you’re at the Music Center and you have a world famous soloist on stage and a thunderstorm rolls in — the rain hits the roof and the orchestra is building up — there is just this magic that isn’t like anywhere else. It’s just this magic about everything coming together out there."

Celebrating its 80th year as an institute for exceptional music education and performance, the Brevard Music Center's 180-acre campus will soon come alive with young talent, bringing in 425 orchestra, jazz, piano and opera students and 80 instructors for a ten-week plunge into the life of professional music.

Originally named the Davidson Music School for Boys, the center opened in 1936 just outside of Charlotte at Davidson College. Founder James Christian Pfohl moved the school to its present location in 1944. Under a new name, the Transylvania Music Camp, he opened the program up to young women. In 1946, it held its first summer music festival, and in 1955, the center took on its present name.

"In terms of significance, there are very few nonprofit organizations that have lasted for 80 years," Brevard Music Center President Mark Weinstein said. "There’s something really working here when I can say that: Over the last 10 years, every single year has been better than the last — and this will be the best year ever in our 80 years of existence."

For one thing, the center's signature indoor-outdoor stage, the Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium, just got a $2.5 million renovation, which will be unveiled later this month.

Built in 1964, the auditorium now features an acoustical shell, which can change position and shape the music being performed on the stage.

"Our acoustics were very, very good up until now — for all these years," Weinstein said. "But now they’ll be incredible. It’s a series of panels that move around on a puff of air and can be brought down (in size) to be used for a piano and a flute or expand back to use all of the panels" for the 301-person closing performance.

Cally Jamis Vennare, the music center's marketing director, explained that the center's small year-round staff is amazed each year by the number of people drawn to campus for the program, a summer intensive for aspiring musicians of ages 14-29.

"You leave work one night and there’s 14 of you (on campus)," she said. "You come to work the next day, and there's 400-some students, 80 faculty, and you have 31,000 people in the audience over the course of the summer. So the campus just swells to hundreds and hundreds of people overnight — music coming out of every nook and cranny on campus."

Lockhart attended the school for two summers, in 1974 and 1975, and the experience stuck with him through the years. He returned in 1996 as a guest conductor. And, though Weinstein never attended the school, he explained that music has had a huge influence on his life path.

"My background is business," he said. "I have an MBA from Harvard, and I was going down the business route. But all my life, I was singing in glee clubs and choruses: I was the only Jewish kid in high school who volunteered to sing in a Catholic church choir. I fell in love with Handel's 'Messiah.' I always sung on the side.

"One day," he said, "I just ran away to the ski lodge, so to speak. But instead of becoming a ski bum, for me, it was music. I quit my job working in strategic planning in Washington, D.C., took a 78 percent pay cut and spent the next 38 years of my life running the opera."

Weinstein has been the executive director of the New York City Opera and the Washington National Opera, the general director of the Pittsburgh Opera and the president and CEO of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

"This is the most rewarding job I’ve ever had," Weinstein said. "It was fun to work with Beverly Sills and Domingo, but it’s nothing like working with the incredibly talented students that are here. It’s kind of like going to a very talented college team's basketball game and watching that, rather than watching the pros. You can tell everyone's giving it everything they have. Everyone’s trying their heart out — this is their aspiration in life — and to be part of that is very rewarding. That’s the feeling you get here."

That said, the program isn't a music camp for beginners or casual players: It's designed to prepare gifted musicians for a lifelong passion or career — "the Aspen or Juilliard of the South," as Tessier described. For the upcoming season, the Brevard Music Center received more than 2,000 applications from all over the world, and, through a highly competitive process, it selects around 230 for the college-level course, 180 high school students and 42 students for the jazz institute, the center's newest program.

"Many of the kids who come here are the best where they’re from," Weinstein explained. "So one student is from Birmingham, Ala., and nobody in Birmingham, Ala. has ever seen anyone play the piano like this kid. Or another is from Cleveland, where there are a lot of people who play piano, and this student is the best in the state.

"A lot of their peers are interested in sports and other kind of things," and maybe, he continued, they don't fit in, "because they like Beethoven and Shostakovich. And they come here and sit in our cafeteria — the one place where everyone here eats three meals, every day — and they’ll be sitting next to the concert master of the Cleveland Orchestra or they’ll be sitting next to Yo-Yo Ma. And they’ll all be talking Beethoven and Mozart and how to approach that high note — things nobody is interested in back home. But they are here."

As part of their studies, the student musicians join their instructors on stage for the summer live music series — 80 performances over a seven-week period from June to August every year.

Live performances are important learning experiences that can't be replicated in a studio or classroom, Weinstein said.

"If they come here to these mountains and they go off and perform to no one, it's like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. It doesn’t matter if it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. Performing a live performance is such an exhilarating experience not only for the audience but for the performer especially — the feedback, the mistakes, how you move on after a mistake. It’s all part of this system, like an ecosystem, where each part depends on the other."

Opening weekend of this summer's series is one of the highlights of the season, including "An American In Paris" on June 24 with world-class French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the 80th Anniversary Spectacular show on June 25 with Grammy-winner Amy Grant backed by the orchestra, Sunday's performance of Shostakovich 5 with Emmanuel Tjeknavorian on violin and a unique banjo concerto performance by Béla Fleck on June 28.

"It’s one amazing thing after another," Weinstein said, including "the first world premiere of an opera ever done here: the opera-noir horror 'Falling Angel.' I’m not sure I had ever heard of an opera-noir before, let alone an opera horror-noir."

"Falling Angel" will premiere at Brevard College's Porter Center on June 30, with an encore performance on July 2.

"You know, what looks to the public like just a concert series is, for our students, their summer curriculum," said Jason Posnock, director of artistic planning and educational programs. "These are important pieces of repetoire they need to learn to play. They're also the greatest works ever written for orchestra, and audiences like them too. ... It's also an opportunity to introduce our students and our audiences to new pieces — pieces that were either written recently or pieces that are not part of the common repetroire, but are still great pieces in their own right."

Of the 80 performances at the Brevard Music Center, half are free — and, for those 17 and younger, watching performances from the lawn is free when accompanied by a paying adult. For a full schedule of the summer series, which ranges from classical to bluegrass to gospel to pop, visit brevardmusic.org.

"Although they all have the talent, not everyone who comes here goes on to become a professional musician," Weinstein said. "But the training they get here is invaluable in their lives — how to practice, what practice means, what perfection means and when you can and can’t achieve it, working together in an ensemble, in a team. So many lessons of life are taught here. And for those that do go on to a career: Although it’s hard to be a professional musician, cobbling together lots of different jobs in order to make a living, it’s probably the most rewarding thing that any of these people can think of. They have a fire in their belly to work with music and to pass on to other people with the talent that they have."

Brevard Festival celebrates 80th anniversary in style