Into the Woods.(Maverick Concerts, Woodstock, New York)(Brief Article)

It would be hard to find a classical-music series as down to earth as Maverick Concerts, which has hosted chamber programs for the past eighty-five years in a woodland hall outside Woodstock, New York. Hervey White, the Whitmanesque leader of a colony of free-living artists and social radicals, put up the concert hall in 1916 with a load of native lumber, an endless line of credit from local merchants, and a group of young friends who shared his minimal skills in architecture. The result was a triumph of improvisation: the barrel-vaulted structure, modelled on meeting houses in the Fiji Islands, seems to spring out of the earth itself (a hundred-foot oak grows right through the porch). Surprisingly, the season's opening concert--an afternoon of Mozart, Debussy, and Dvorak performed by the Rossetti String Quartet and the pianist Ursula Oppens--proved that White's sketchy knowledge of acoustics was somehow sufficient to bless the hall with a remarkably warm and enveloping sound. The inside ambience is half chapel, half hunting lodge: four peeled tree trunks hold up the roof, and pictures of White and some of the musicians associated with the festival (including the conductor Leon Barzin and the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell) line the walls. The Maverick Horse, a totemic eighteen-foot sculpture that embodies the festival's spirit, stands guard to the left of the stage.

Like so much of Woodstock culture, Maverick doesn't stand on ceremony. Tickets cannot be reserved, and if you want to get into the hall (which seats two hundred and twenty-five), you'd better arrive early, or else you'll have to make do with one of the comfortable ...