Berkshire High Peaks Festival Finds a New Mountain to Call Home

The Berkshire High Peaks Festival has never settled down. Founded in 2010 in Hunter and Tannersville, New York, by cellist Yehuda Hanani as an informal extension of conservatory music study—shared meals, hikes, and "serious immersion" for a small circle of students who didn't want their training to end with the semester—the festival has since moved through the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, the Berkshire School in Sheffield, and Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington.

This summer, July 22–August 3, it lands at The Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York, on the mountainside campus of the former Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, a National Historic Landmark nestled between the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires.

Darrow's 365-acre campus, dressed in stone and timber, original Shaker buildings and wooded trails, has weathered its own recent uncertainty—the school nearly closed in 2024 before a community fundraising effort pulled it back from the brink—which gives this particular pairing of itinerant music festival and recently rescued historic campus a certain resonance.

Hanani, who directs the festival as the educational arm of his Berkshires-based chamber series "Close Encounters With Music," has described the festival's founding ethos in straightforward terms. "When I was approached by a group of students to continue our conservatory work informally over the summer, this was meant to be personal, non-institutional, with shared meals, hikes and enjoying the beauty of the Hudson Valley and Berkshires as a backdrop to serious immersion," he has said. "We began with strings, added piano, and recently a vocal department, but have managed to retain the spontaneity and freshness of our origins."

That spontaneity has come with a fair amount of restlessness. The program has run out of a Shaker campus, a New England prep school at the foot of Mount Everett, and a small liberal arts college, with student performances scattered across Hudson Valley and Berkshire venues including the Norman Rockwell Museum, Basilica Hudson, the Orpheum Theater in Tannersville, and the New York State Museum in Albany over the years. The constant has been the faculty and the format: a roughly ten-day residency of private lessons, chamber coaching, and public-facing master classes and concerts, all free except for one ticketed performance, with whatever modest proceeds the festival generates from that single paid concert routed back into student tuition support.

Hanani arrived in the United States by way of his own improbable path. Born in Jerusalem, he was brought to the country at 19 by Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern after Bernstein heard him perform while guest-conducting the Israel Philharmonic. He went on to study with Leonard Rose at Juilliard and with Pablo Casals, and has since performed with the Chicago Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Berlin Radio Symphony, among others, while building a parallel career as a broadcaster—his weekly WAMC program, "Classical Music According to Yehuda," has run for years as an outreach effort aimed at making classical music legible to the uninitiated.

Festival Performances Off Campus

This year's public season opens Friday, July 24 at 2:30pm with a vocal master class at the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio in Lenox, led by mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley and pianist Tatiana Lokhina, featuring the festival's vocal students alongside the Illinois-based Dakiti String Quartet. The Bauhaus-and-marble home and studio of Modernist painters George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen, now a house museum, holds a significant collection of Cubist works by Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris, and the festival's selections are intended to resonate with the art and architecture on display.

The following evening, Saturday, July 25 at 7pm, faculty take the stage for the Opening "Moonlight Sonatas" concert at The Tannery, an 1834 Shaker barn on the Darrow campus. The program brings together pianists Alexander Shtarkman, Max Levinson, and Lokhina; violinists Ari Isaacman-Beck and James Stern; violist Anthony Devroye; and Hanani himself on cello.

On Sunday, July 26 at 3pm, the festival returns to one of its longtime venues, Chesterwood in Stockbridge—the former home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French—for a program of Beethoven, Dvořák (the Dakiti String Quartet performing the String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat major), Vaughan Williams, and Kodály's Duo for Violin and Piano, alongside additional vocal and faculty selections. It is the only ticketed concert of the festival, at $25 per person, or $22.50 for Chesterwood members.

Public events continue through the festival's run with additional outreach concerts and master classes across the Berkshires, Hudson Valley, and Catskills, including a performance and master class partnership with Catwalk Institute and Beattie Powers Place in Catskill, New York, and a full slate of single-instrument master classes back at Darrow—vocal coaching from Metropolitan Opera's Paula Suozzi on July 23, viola with Devroye on July 25, cello with Hanani on July 27, violin with Stern on July 28, and piano sessions with Shtarkman and Levinson on July 29 and 30, respectively.

The season closes with back-to-back "Moonlight Sonatas" concerts at The Tannery on Saturday, August 1 and Sunday, August 2, both at 7pm, showcasing student and faculty performers across the full two weeks of repertoire.

All events are free except the July 26 concert at Chesterwood. Full details and registration at cewm.org/high-peaks-festival.