Strathmore center’s expansion season

Strathmore Hall Arts Center has been something of a hidden treasure on the Washington area cultural scene for more than 20 years. That’s why an air of nostalgia surrounds the summer of 2004.By February, this will be the Music Center at Strathmore, a $100 million major-league entry in the area’s ongoing cultural expansion. By this time next year, Strathmore will no longer be much of a secret.

The traditional programs and activities that have made the place a gem will continue, including free concerts on the lawn in the summer. However, the atmosphere, given the size of the new music center, will have changed considerably.

“It’s an exciting time, obviously,” says Eliot Pfanstiehl, Strathmore’s executive director, as he sits in a very modern conference room at the Strathmore mansion.

“But we’re all very much aware of how special this place has been and remains.”

The 11-acre site, with its historic mansion, rolling green lawn and gazebo, has served as an unofficial Montgomery County arts center since 1983. It’s winding up its usual busy summer season of free concerts, children’s events, art exhibitions and afternoon teas in a setting that remains blissfully bucolic and soothing.

“It is,” says Kathryn Barclay, a long-time volunteer at Strathmore, “an oasis.”

It remains a get-away-from-it-all place even though Rockville Pike’s commuter and shopping traffic rolls by just outside the grounds. It has the advantage, too, of having a Metro station practically on-site, or at least adjacent, the Grosvenor-Strathmore Red Line station.

Yet a visitor to the mansion can’t help but notice the big music center construction under way with its curved lines. For the patrons of Strathmore and the people who make things happen in the mansion, the site is the fruition of a long-standing dream, a great leap into a huge new future.

A 4-by-4-foot artist’s rendering of the music center hall and how it’s envisioned — bathed in golden light, an orchestra and choir in performance — looms large in the conference room where Mr. Pfanstiehl sits.

But you can hear the dishes being cleared from one of the 1 p.m. summer afternoon high-tea concerts in the Dorothy M. and Maurice C. Shapiro Music Room.

That’s also where the Strathmore holds its acclaimed regular Music in the Mansion series, in which classical, jazz and pop musicians have performed in an intimate setting holding 100 seats.

By contrast, the new music center hall will have nearly 2,000 seats.

For now, it is still summer, and people are coming to Strathmore, especially on Wednesday nights for the free Washington Area Music Timeline Concert Series, five of which remain.

In addition, there have been five free Strathmore Summer Serenade concerts, a series that winds up tonight with the world premiere of “Emergence: A Cicada Serenade” by composer David Kane.

The Timeline Concerts are something new at Strathmore. The series, 64 concerts in all, emerged from a historic musical timeline being put together by the Washington Area Music Association. It begins with John Philip Sousa and extends to the present.

Shelley Brown, vice president for programming at Strathmore, is also on the WAMA board and saw how the timeline could serve as a basis for a series of concerts.

“I thought that it was a great opportunity to showcase music styles, the richness of Washington musical traditions,” says Ms. Brown, 38. “There are so many performers, musicians and styles that many people don’t know about. We began to see this as a series of concerts leading right up to the opening of the music center in February.”

The series, which features appropriate performers playing music significant to the Washington area music history, would be performed indoors during the regular admission-charged September-to-May season and the free lawn concerts throughout the summer.

It moved from the opening Sept. 3, 2003, concert featuring the Classical Brass performing music by John Philip Sousa, through concerts celebrating such performers as Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Patsy Cline, Roy Clark, Tim Buckley, the Legendary Orioles , Bo Diddley and Marvin Gaye, as well as events and venues such as Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto or Alexandria’s Birchmere Music Hall.

As the timeline moved on, the concert series became something more than just a series of live music performances. The concerts became a bridge to the past and the future and expanded the audience base at Strathmore, just as the Washington music base revealed itself to be extremely eclectic.

“We saw it that way as it moved along,” Ms. Brown says. “We saw people that you don’t usually see come to the concerts, depending on what kind of music was being performed and who was there.”

By this summer, the timeline had moved into the 1970s and 1980s. On this night, Chuck Brown, the legendary “godfather of go-go” is performing in person, showcasing his own place in Washington music history.

Hundreds of people have shown up, crossing at least three generations, by all appearances and sounds. Many of them apparently spent their youth listening and dancing to the relentless beat of Mr. Brown’s distinctive music. The grand old man — Mr. Brown is 70 years old — just keeps right on going, uninterrupted, singing and playing as if nothing will ever end.

Chuck Brown’s night is a far cry from the mansion’s early days as a cultural center. The site historically had been many things, including a farm, a stagecoach station and, in 1899, the place where Capt. James Frederick Oyster and his wife, Emma, built the foundation for a nine-bedroom house. There have been additions and changes over the years, but this is the mansion we see now.

Charles I. Corby, a wealthy baking industry inventor, bought the house and 99 acres in 1908. In 1943 two parcels of the Corby estate were conveyed to St. Mary’s Academy. In 1945 and 1946 the sisters removed the furniture and turned the house into a convent and a school they named Saint Angela Hall. In 1977 it was sold to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. In 1979, the site’s 11 acres, including the mansion, were sold to Montgomery County.

That is where the story of Strathmore, the hidden cultural treasure and oasis, properly begins.

After purchasing the property, Montgomery County officials decided to rename the mansion Strathmore Hall (after nearby Strathmore Avenue) and with the creation of the Strathmore Hall Foundation set about developing plans for the county’s first center of the arts.

In 1981, they asked Mr. Pfanstiehl, a man with a rich and impressive record in the cultural and education arena, who already was arts coordinator for Montgomery County’s Recreation Department, to be the executive director. The center opened two years later.

Mr. Pfanstiehl, a genial, enthusiastic native Washingtonian, accepted the offer. Talking to him, you can see he is one of those expansive art enthusiasts, a pragmatist who can get things done, a promoter of the arts.

He was the founder and chairman of the Montgomery County Arts Council, president of the League of Washington Theaters and one of the founders of the Round House Theatre, which has a new theater in Bethesda.

For his efforts in spearheading the drive for the new Music Center at Strathmore, he was named a 2001 Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian Magazine.

“The first thing that had to happen was that the whole place needed to be renovated,” Mr. Pfanstiehl says.

“And we needed volunteers. That’s the only way it was going to work.”

One of the original volunteers was Mrs. Barclay, who lived nearby in Garrett Park and had always been interested in art and music.

“My husband had passed away, and so I was approached to help, and I soon found some like-minded friends, and that’s how it started. I remember the gift shop was originally a butler’s pantry,” Mrs. Barclay says. “The word about us just spread around.”

Mr. Pfanstiehl had a vision: “Here was this place, the gateway to Rockville and the shopping areas along Rockville Pike,” he says. “It was a beautiful setting. And lo and behold, it was easy to get to right on the Metro site. So there was that. And to me, if we could offer a reason to come, then we had the setting.

“I saw it as a family treasure,” he says. “It was a bastion of civilization to me. The teas exemplified that, and so did the music and the art.

Mrs. Barclay calls the work “exhausting but wonderfully rewarding.”

With the mansion properly spruced up, Strathmore could open its doors in 1983 and let out the sound of music. The first concert was “The American Composer: His Music and His Muses,” featuring young composer Mark Wilson.

Over the years, jazz, acoustic pop and classical chamber music came to be hallmarks of the Strathmore presence along with the contribution of prominent musicians. Virgil Thomson participated in the composer series before his death in 1989, as did the famed contemporary composer John Cage in 1989.

Jazz bassist Keter Betts began a series of performances at Strathmore in 1984. In 1985, the afternoon teas with musical performances began. In 1988, the Gudelsky Gazebo, a classically styled six-column copper-roofed structure and performance space holding up to 30 musicians, was installed.

Along with the concert series, Strathmore, with its two floors of gallery spaces featuring rooms that flow gracefully and naturally into each other, inaugurated regular exhibitions in 1983. Cozy Baker, owner of a huge kaleidoscope collection, curated the National Kaleidoscope Exhibition in 1985, the first of its kind.

“That helped put us on the map,” Mrs. Barclay recalls.

In 1996, a second $3 million expansion included the Gudelsky Gallery Suite and an outdoor sculpture garden. This also was the year of “Common Bond,” an exhibition of local black artists.

By the 1990s, Strathmore had become a true arts center and a cultural treasure. Bigger plans were on the way, of course.

In the meantime, the Timeline Concerts had begun, along with the free summer concerts on the lawn. The Timeline Concerts, with the series’ relatively large, diverse and new audience, seemed to echo the past but point directly toward the future.

In this last summer before the opening of the new music center, Chuck Brown, perhaps inadvertently, gets it right.

The beat pumping as steadily as time itself, Mr. Brown urges the crowd on, chanting:

“I see Rockville…in the house…

“I see Silver Spring…in the house…

“I see Washington…in the house…”

That’s the future. Right here at Strathmore.

WHAT: The Washington Area Music Timeline Concert Series

WHERE: Gudelsky Concert Pavilion, outdoors on the Strathmore Mansion lawn, Strathmore Hall Arts Center, 10701 Rockville Pike (Maryland Route 355), North Bethesda. The series will move indoors into the mansion every Wednesday beginning Sept. 8 and will continue through Feb. 5.

WHEN: 6 p.m. Aug. 18; 7:30 p.m. other Wednesdays on the lawn through Sept. 1.

TICKETS: Free.

INFORMATION: 301/530-0540 or www.strathmore.org

HIGHLIGHTS:

Aug. 4: Sally Love performs in a tribute to folk music legend Emmylou Harris.

Aug. 11: Rare Essence, stars of the D.C. go-go tradition from the early 1980s.

Aug. 18: The Skylighters, members of the Seldom Scene and Last Train Home, in a tribute to the Birchmere, the legendary Alexandria venue for acoustic, bluegrass, folk, and rock.

Aug. 25: Nils Lofgren, former member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band and owner of a 36-year-career as a solo performer and member of Grin and Neil Young’s backing band, with Bob Berberich, Tom Lofgren, Maryanne Redmond, Tommy Lepson and others.

Sept. 1: Caldwell Gray of the Cravin’ Dogs and friends in a tribute to the original 102.3 WHFS-FM radio station (now 99.1), which dubbed itself “free-form progressive homegrown radio.”

Tonight at Strathmore

Just because the cicadas are gone doesn’t mean you can’t still hear about them. “Emergence: A Cicada Serenade,” a new orchestral work written by composer David Kane and commissioned by Strathmore, will have its world premiere outdoors at the Gudelsky Concert Pavilion tonight at 7:30 p.m. The piece is scored for violin, cello, french horn, clarinet, oboe, percussion, and piano/synthesizer.

The free concert’s insect theme will include performances of Benjamin Britten’s “Two Insect Pieces,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and Grieg’s “Papillon.”

The concert is the last of five free outdoor Strathmore Summer Serenade concerts.

Strathmore is at 10701 Rockville Pike (Maryland Route 355) in North Bethesda. Mansion gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday; and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Call 301/530-0540, or see www.strathmore.org.