Tom Pacheco

In November, 1971, a man calling himself D.B. Cooper boarded a jetliner in Oregon, which he would exit at 10,000 feet in the air with a parachute, a bag stuffed with cash and a leap into history, legend and the lyrics of a Tom Pacheco song. Much later, in July, 2016, the FBI would announce that it was closing its D.B. Cooper skyjacking case file after 45 years without a solution.

Tom, something of a legend himself, who had solved the case with the tools of a whimsically unfettered imagination, noted the news with a smile. “I remember thinking, when I wrote that song, that if they ever find the real D.B. Cooper, it’ll lose some of its mystery and punch,” he said, having placed his bet on the lasting mystique of Cooper’s disappearance. “But it seems to be safe now.”

With 27 album releases of original songs to his credit, it’s not a sure thing that the song will be on the playlist for his now traditional set of two Labor Day weekend concerts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 3 and Sunday, September 4 at the Empire State Railway Museum, 70 Lower High Street in Phoenicia, but it is a certainty that playlist will captivate those in attendance and — in the event it is missing — although written in 2013,”The Lost Diary of D.B. Cooper” is included on his most recent CD Boomtown.

While Tom’s loyal local following have often had to travel to Beacon, Hyde Park or even Narrowsburg to absorb a fresh live performance in recent years, the Railway Museum’s Flying Cat Music series at the edge of Phoenicia offers an all too rare opportunity right here in Ulster County to savor Pacheco’s songs in person. For a Massachusetts-born musician whose home base has shifted from Greenwich Village to Texas, Tennessee, California and Ireland throughout his career, it’s a treat for Pacheco and fans to  commune so close to his permanent home base in Woodstock, which he returned to in 1997 after a decade in Dublin, particularly with the embellishments of guitarist Brian Hollander at the concerts. “I’m always comfortable having Brian alongside me on stage,” Pacheco noted. “And the room (at the Railway Museum) is fine for attentive listening.”

Tom’s scene-shifting has caused some puzzlement abroad in devotees of ‘Americana’ music; “Although he has had success in Europe, songwriter Tom Pacheco is virtually unknown in America, which is somewhat of a mystery, since his songs are frequently brilliant and have been covered by countless folk and country artists,” writes a reviewer in Europe. A clue may be found in the fact that Pacheco’s themes, while deep in nvolvements with love, dreams and other vital ingredients, range further into narrative areas which are far from typical for commercial radio fare.

“Pacheco picks through the fabric of a society being torn apart…” notes a reviewer at an Australian website, “… a master storyteller, (Tom) is the voice of a generation fighting globalisation, greed, pollution, war and sharp spokes of rampant prejudice.” These are not themes favored by corporate programmers but, rather, topics that reach into the contemporary human spirit in daily struggles of perception before sanity was trampled by technology. Often, you can hear mention in cafe conversation of what is being lost from our musical culture by radio airwave limitations but, thankfully, Tom Pacheco’s muse is not bound by the same restrictions. When setting the universe to music, imagination is not a boundary but a vehicle with clear-vision verity on highbeam along darker sections of road.

Currently polishing lyrics for a forthcoming blues-flavored album by Monika Nordli, (a friend in Oslo, Norway, where Tom has also recorded several times), Pacheco has penned a few new tunes he plans on debuting at the Labor Day Weekend concerts, including a card game challenge with “The Prince of Death” which suggests we can draw on hidden resources even when facing the most imposing of adversaries. Rising poverty and hunger inhabits another new tune set against disputed claims of economic ‘recovery’ and employment figures now being questioned in political debates.

Having explored this territory in songs like “Cheaper In China,” “Full Time Job” or with the work-seeking drifter of “Norfolk, Little Rock, Memphis,” Tom can sketch out this theme among so many others in life he has treated with pathos, irony, humor, joy and concern. No topic is out of the reach of melody and rhythm for those of us with music in our hearts and Tom Pacheco has expertly and lovingly wandered this terrain for decades.

A corporate grip on popular musical airwaves, reducing cultural reinforcement to a diminished series of standard formulas, renders it not uncommon to hear the current music scene described impolitely in casual conversation or sometimes seem omnipresent on radio dials but there is still true artistry circling in nearby nightspots we can visit to enjoy an evening out and this weekend offers a prime example at the Railway Museum.

Excepting his annual Christmas week show at the Rosendale Cafe, Pacheco’s appearance schedule is blank until planned tours of the British Isles and Scandinavia in the Spring, which elevates this weekend higher in the realm of live entertainment opportunity in an historic location that came of age in the same 1880s that gave us this holiday.

Besides Hollander and guitar, Tom takes the stage Saturday and Sunday with a memorable assemblage of heroes and outlaws; lovers and haters; strangers and neighbors; drifters and pioneers; angels and aliens and a brim-filled container of dreams. Welcome him.

If D.B. Cooper shows up, he’ll be the old guy in the corner with a grin.

Seats for this engagement tend to disappear quickly, so advance reservations are strongly urged. The doors open at 7 p.m. and music begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $18 or $15 with reservations. For information or reservations email flyingcatmusic@gmail.com or call 845-688-9453.

We had a world record five classical Maverick Concerts since my last column a mere two weeks ago. The first, August 20, was the annual Chamber Orchestra Concert with Maverick’s music director Alexander Platt leading the “Maverick Chamber Players,” mostly members of Boston’s Aurora Ensemble. The program opened with piano soloist Adam Tendler, who made a great impression last summer, in Bach’s Concerto No. 4 in A. His approach was crisp and clear although his embellishments to the text were sparse. Platt’s ten string players could easily have been overbalanced by the piano but they never were. The strings alone then played Aaron Copland’s rarely-heard late masterpiece, Nonet for Strings. It’s one long movement evolving through several moods, mostly somber but evolving into dancelike rhythms in Copland’s “Americana” style. The playing was strong and committed. Cellist Emmanuel Feldman took the stage to celebrate the 100th birthday anniversary of Alberto Ginastera with his “Punena No. 2” for solo cello, a highly imaginative piece which builds on the techniques of Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello. Feldman played this piece for Maverick three years ago; if memory serves he played it even better this time.

Tendler took the stage after intermission for a major Copland work I’ve never heard played live before, the “Piano Fantasy” of 1957. This long meditative piece seems to take off from Copland’s “Piano Variations” of three decades earlier and recycles its ideas, adding new ones along the way for half an hour. Or, in Tendler’s hands, 34 minutes, which might explain why the music seemed to drag occasionally, although it was overall a mesmerizing experience for me. The concert concluded with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, with a surprisingly huge sound from the small string ensemble and Tendler playing continuo on the piano. I don’t know if I’d ever want to hear this music played at such fast speeds again but it was exhilarating while it lasted.

On August 21, the renowned Borromeo String Quartet demonstrated why it’s so well known with strong-toned, powerful performances of Haydn’s Quartet in E Flat, Op. 76, No. 6, and Beethoven’s Quartet in E Flat, Op. 127. Throughout both, the group was meticulous about accuracy, ensemble, and dynamics, including some extreme but appropriate contrasts in the Beethoven. Despite the great quality of these heavy-hitters, though, the main excitement of the program came from the world premiere of Russell Platt’s “Mountain Interval,” the last of Maverick’s centennial commissions. We in Woodstock may think of Russell as Alexander’s brother, or as the music editor of The New Yorker. He’s also an accomplished composer with a number of recordings and high-level credits. (He was also, while a student at the Curtis Institute, a classmate of two members of the Borromeo Quartet.) Platt drew inspiration for his work from the poems of Robert Frost, who provided the title for the piece and most of the seven movements; and from Beethoven, whose seven-movement design for his Op. 131 Quartet Platt imitated here. But the music isn’t overtly programmatic, and the relationship to Beethoven isn’t directly audible. This work, mostly in a lyrical atonal style which verges into flat-out tonality, is most notable for its strongly emotional quality. While the Presto sixth movement generated a lot of excitement, I came away most with how accurate the composer’s description of the last movement is: “inconsolable.” As you’d expect, the performance, involving friends of the composer’s, was very powerful and convincing. You can hear it for yourself at the Borromeo website, livingarchive.org.

Two more string quartets played the following weekend. I guessed right that the St. Lawrence String Quartet was scheduled for Friday, August 26; it was a free night the ensemble had before a Saturday night concert nearby. But I guessed wrong that the unusual date would limit the audience, which turned out in very good numbers. The St. Lawrence’s Haydn — a specialty of theirs, as it should be for all string quartets — was interestingly different from the Borromeo’s. In the Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3, the St. Lawrence sound was noticeably leaner than the huge round tone of the Borromeo, but still quite beautiful in quality. This performance did a wonderful job of emphasizing the eccentric, unpredictable elements that make Haydn’s music so continually fascinating, with very strong viola playing and superb ensemble. I’m a fan of the music of John Adams, whose “Nixon in China” is one of the 20th century’s great operas. So it gives me no pleasure to report that I found his String Quartet No. 2 surprisingly unsuccessful. Adams based his piece on fragments from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 110. This created two problems for me. One is that I kept recognizing, and being distracted by, the Beethoven fragments; the other is that what Adams did with these fragments wasn’t nearly as interesting as what Beethoven did with them. The two long movements didn’t seem cohesive, either, although near the end of the second the music started getting exciting. Too little, too late. The piece was written for these musicians and they played the hell out of it. They also did very well with the concluding work, Schumann’s String Quartet in A, Op. 41, No. 3, which was on their debut CD almost 20 years ago. Two of the members are new since then but they all played as though they had been living with the music for a long time.

Sunday, August 28, we had yet more Haydn from the Enso String Quartet: one of the last two, Op. 77, No. 1. This group had a crisp, clean sound, also very beautiful in tonal quality, and again with lots of strong viola sound (which I mention because weak viola sound is often a problem with string quartets). I loved the way these players dug in for the rhythms of the Menuetto. I’ve heard the finale played faster than this but not necessarily better. Henri Dutilleux was born 100 years ago, but he died only three years ago. He’s not as well known in the U.S. as he should be; he was a major master. His “Ainsi la nuit” (“Thus the night”) is a series of seven movements, mostly continuous, with some brief connections the composer calls “parentheses.” Dutilleux uses many “extended” techniques including Ligeti-like tone clusters. I don’t hear strong continuity in this work (although it may well be there) but to me it’s a glorious series of related miniatures, almost like a museum gallery. The ensemble met its challenges with gusto and was rewarded with an ovation from the audience. Joaquin Turina’s “Serenata” proved a brief, amusing trifle, a calm interlude before the exciting storm of Ginastera’s String Quartet No. 1, another centenary celebration for a 1916 composer. At this period of Ginastera’s career (1948) he was writing vividly folklike, highly accessible music, which the audience predictably loved. As did I.

Between these events, on Saturday, August 27, was what I must regretfully describe as the most unsatisfactory Maverick Concert I can recall. The programming was certainly interesting enough:  two Ravel violin masterpieces surrounding a collection of recent arrangements of music from Eastern Europe and the orient. And both violinist Lara St. John and pianist Matt Herskowitz played very well. The problem was that Herskowitz played as if he thought he was the only musician on the stage, sometimes drowning out St. John so completely that I had to look at her to make sure she was still playing. (She was.) St. John is a wonderful and original musician, but she needs a new musical partner desperately.

On Thursday, August 18, I traveled down to Ellenville’s St. John’s Memorial Episcopal Church out of great curiosity. I’d never heard of a concert series in Ellenville before, which turns out to be my ignorance. This venue has hosted four concerts a year for the past eight years. The performers, calling themselves the Ellenville Chamber Ensemble, played a serious string quartet program, which I heard about only because a friend of the composer Frederic Sharaf wrote to me about it. Sharaf’s new String Quartet No. 4, which opened the concert, received its world premiere on this occasion. Sharaf, in his early eighties, has an impressive resume of teachers and previous performances and an impressive publisher (Carl Fisher). I wondered why I’d never heard of him before, and now I know. Sharaf writes very well for strings, and his music is of fine quality, but if you were told it had been written 100 years ago you would believe it. His melodic and harmonic style is very far out of date, not a crippling problem in itself but not what most musicians want to play. Parts of this piece sounded like Borodin, who died well over a century ago (1887, actually), and parts like Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” (composed 1899). The program was odd — a premiere, half a Haydn Quartet, and a complete Shostakovich Quartet — but it was diverse and demanding enough to hear that, improbably, these musicians have formed a coherent and expert ensemble. The Shostakovich Sixth Quartet was their greatest challenge and they played it like a world-class ensemble. These concerts are free and they do draw an audience. I’ll try to arrange for notice of further events in case anyone else wants the excuse I welcome to eat at Aroma Thyme.

This weekend and beyond

Very much music is coming up in the near future. Maverick has two more full weekends of concerts. On September 3, at 6 p.m., pianists Andrew Russo and Frederic Chiu each play solos and then combine for Stravinsky’s four-hand version of his complete ballet “Petrouchka.” This duo’s version of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was one of the standouts of last summer. Sunday is the Friends of the Maverick concert, where a $50 contribution gets you an hour of music played by pianist Pedja Muzijevic (Haydn, Crumb, and Schubert) and a buffet.

Saturday, September 10, at 8 p.m., Happy Traum and Friends promises some impressive friends along with the impressive guitar & vocals of Happy. Sunday, the 11th, at 4 p.m., is the official end of the season, as the Pacifica String Quartet plays Mozart, Beethoven, and Shulamit Ran. However, on Saturday, September 18, at 8 p.m., the Julian Lage Trio makes up the concert which was prevented by a power outage on August 13. Saugerties Pro Musica, SUNY New Paltz, and of course Bard begin seasons in September but I’ll have more details in my final summer column in two weeks.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

“If you’re not trained as an artist, there’s no right or wrong,” said sculptor Nick Della Penna, standing amidst the monumental yet whimsical structures of Rock Star Meadow in Lake Hill. “What you do can be a disaster, or it can be freeing. If you keep looking at it, it changes. Your eye keeps feeding back and tells you what to do.”

Over the past 28 years, Della Penna has built a stunning complex of walls, gates, and pillars, decorated with sculptures and mosaics. His muse and collaborator, Estelle Ross, died four months ago. “I feel so deeply lonely on the meadow without her,” said Della Penna. “When you work together with someone, you get very close — in a different way from a marriage.” He has inherited her dog, a sturdy bit of fluff named Reggie.

Ross and Della Penna met at a school in West Babylon, Long Island, where he was teaching third grade, and she was teaching fifth. They shared the same birthday, October 7. “Teaching public school, you have to have somebody,” said Della Penna. “You look for a person you can survive with.”

In 1980, Della Penna and his wife, Lorraine, bought the property near the western end of Woodstock for a summer getaway. “It was an apple orchard and a dump, full of bottles and junk,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what to do with myself all summer, so I started to stack stone, and it was so much fun. In 1988, someone told me, ‘They’re running motorbikes on your property.’ So I put up a wall.”

He hauled rocks from local brooks, piled them up, then added little touches, such as niches where he could put the little clay sculptures he’d been making in the pottery shop at school. “It was something make-believe,” he said. “Like when you were young, like living in a castle.” Ross came upstate to visit, and Della Penna asked her for help, to hold stones in place as he worked. Soon she was deeply involved in the building process. “She had a fine eye and a delicate touch, and there was a calmness. Anything could happen, and I felt safe, even when we got chased for taking rocks. We would go to a stream, walking with Reggie. It’s hot, and we walk into the stream. ‘What do you think of that rock? We could put it on that other one…’”

Ross was the first person to look at his early sculptures and tell him they were great. Later she encouraged him to start carving in marble, “a wonderful experience.” Recently, she insisted he needed a studio on the meadow. They found a structure at Farmer Jones Barns in Shandaken and finished putting it up two weeks before Ross died on the Ides of March. The room is beautiful, with polished dark wood floors and a cast-iron chandelier, but Della Penna hasn’t done any work in it yet; the grief is still too fresh.

Like the ruins of a medieval fortress, stone walls arc and ripple across the field. One wall is embedded with the white stucco star that gave the complex its Rock Star name. An archway leads to a circle of perforated walls, where sitting in contemplation would be as appropriate as conducting a pagan ritual. Behind the circle rises a stepped tower. “This was the most dangerous and the most fun to build,” said Della Penna. “I tapered it so it would stand even after the mortar breaks down.”

Everywhere the eye falls, stone mass meets fine-boned art. Niches and windows are filled with sculptures by turns bawdy, macabre, humorous, lovely. Ross made most of the mosaics mounted in the walls, creating elegant, complex floral or abstract patterns, dominated by a radiant shade of blue. One set of pillars is devoted to Della Penna’s mosaics: portraits of his children, Ali and Erik, and his grandchildren; a vivid likeness of his wife, labeled “Queen Lorraine”; a resplendent Estelle; a skeleton seated at a computer.

At the front of the property is the newest structure, a long brick wall with a stone gateway in the center, made of rocks Mike Stock cleared away after the Mink Hollow stream overflowed. On one of the tapering wings of the wall, two-story-high flowers undulate alongside a lion. Like everything else on the meadow, this wall did not come from a plan but evolved over time. “I wanted to use these Belgian blocks,” said Della Penna, pointing to the flower stems, made of pale gray stone from the Shultis stoneyard in Willow. The lion’s face is a piece of bluestone, carved and stuccoed. I asked about the unicorn horn on the lion’s head, and he said, shrugging, “You’re doing a lion, but it needs something.” He’s still working on the wing to the left of the gate. “I’m trying to top the other wing. It’s a competition with myself. This one will be focused around Estelle.”

Set in front of the wall is a slab of stone that will support a bronze plaque with a poem bearing witness to the work Ross and Della Penna did together.

Although the artist now lives in Woodland Valley with his wife, he comes every day to the meadow. “Even in lousy weather,” he said, “I come to touch it. It’s like a child — you protect it. If I see a crack in a stone that no one else would notice — it’s like a child chipping a tooth.”

Rock Star Meadow has occasionally been compared to the massive stonework complex at the other end of Woodstock, Opus 40. But the aesthetic of Harvey Fite’s meticulous work is completely different from the spontaneous, anarchic creations in Lake Hill. “I’m not a craftsman,” declared Della Penna. “I’m sloppy. I don’t measure.      I’m always having many ideas, and most of them are ridiculous. But if one keeps coming back, then it’s going to be a reality.” He pointed out how some of the walls have a little horizontal wave. “No mason would tolerate that. I didn’t intend it, but I went with it.”

Della Penna traces the impetus for the work back to his childhood in the Bronx, where he was a short, mouthy Italian kid in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. “All that leads into this,” he said. “Whenever something hurts, energy is triggered. It could be seeing Trump on TV, or being treated badly at a store. When I get angry, I could talk, yell, but the only thing for me that compensates is building, moving stone. It’s like an athletic event.”

I asked if he has thoughts about what will happen to his and Ross’s creation when he’s gone. “My son said maybe Woodstock could make a park out of it,” he mused. “I don’t know. I only think about now.” However, he wants the work to be seen. “People often stop by, and most of the time, I’m surprisingly good-natured.”

Rock Star Meadow is located at 4129 Route 212 in Lake Hill.

A werewolf and a werepanther, fast-paced banter inspired by George Bernard Shaw, songs that alternate Gilbert and Sullivan with haunting Balkan dissonance — these are the ingredients of Katherine Burger’s musical comedy The Curse of Batvia. A staged reading will be performed in the rustic Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock on Friday, September 9, at 8 p.m.

“It’s like P.G. Wodehouse on speed,” explained Burger. She is perhaps best-known locally as an artist, partly due to her 18 years running the residency program at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, but Burger also writes, sings, and acts — skills that brought her into the world of “musical comedy — two of the greatest words in the English language,” she said with a laugh.

She has been writing plays for many years, including Morphic Resonance, which was produced in Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Berlin. The Curse of Batvia was begun when she was living in Olivebridge in a little house where Spalding Gray had spent some time. On a dreary November evening, Burger, an admitted Anglophile, longed to read an atmospheric mystery of the moors. She didn’t have such a book at hand, so she decided to write a play.

She had just worked with a group of playwrights devising an ending to Too Good To Be True, George Bernard Shaw’s last, unfinished play. “I so enjoyed living with the Shavian language, the archness and silliness, the banter,” she recalled. “I wrote a little play and had a reading at Medicine Show Theater in New York City. One of the wonderful people I had met at Byrcliffe was a composer and playwright, Roland Tec, who saw the show and said it should be a musical — and he’d like to write the music.”

Tec, former director of the Dramatists Guild, worked with Burger on the play. She applied to BMI Theater Workshop to learn how to structure a musical. “The dialogue has to lead up to the song, and the songs eat time,” she observed. “It’s a different structure from a play.” The script received BMI’s Harriman Award for best libretto of the year.

The Curse of Batvia has received several other readings at prominent venues such as the Emerging Artist Festival and “Musical Mondays” at the Jerry Orbach Theater in New York. Burger showed the score to Alexander Platt, the musical director at Maverick, and he liked it. “It’s not a Maverick production, but they’re allowing us to use the space,” said Burger. “We have four amazing singer-actors, all with Broadway credits. Mary Feinsinger is the musical director and pianist, and we have a violinist and a bassoon player.” One of the actors, Luis Villabon, will be flying off to Chile the next day to stage a Spanish-language version of A Chorus Line.

Burger’s plot revolves around two British characters — Chief Inspector Cottage and the crotchety Lord Roderick Recluse — and a brother and sister from the land of Batvia who are seeking a book of spells to break the curse that turns them into were-creatures under the full moon. The Brits express themselves through English music hall numbers, while siblings Anthea and Gunter sing songs like “I’m Done Being a Carnivore,” in the eerie tones of Eastern European music. Convoluted wordplay and outsized characters are part of a show designed purely to entertain, simultaneously literate and over-the-top.

Katherine Burger’s The Curse of Batvia will be presented in a staged reading at Maverick Concert Hall, 120 Maverick Road, Woodstock, on Friday, September 9, at 8 p.m. Maverick ticket books will not apply; admission is by donation.