Arcadia lost

For a number of years, a musical highlight of the summer has been attending performances of the Seattle Chamber Music Society's summer festival at the Lakeside School in north Seattle.

As I discussed three years ago, a major part of the attraction (for me) has been wandering around Lakeside's bucolic campus -- reminiscent of a New England prep school -- on a warm summer evening, enjoying a picnic before the concert, and mingling with the many non-paying music lovers who chose to sit on the lawn outside St. Nicholas Hall, enjoying the music as it was piped out to them over speakers.

Unfortunately, those days are now over. Lakeside now needs to use its campus facilities for its own students, even during summer. The relationship with the chamber music festival ended at its close last year. For the first time, the summer festival, like the society's winter festival, is being held downtown at the Nordstrom recital auditorium in Benaroya Hall.

I attended a performance last night. Nationally prominent musicians performed works by Kodály and Frank Martin, and an especially beautiful quintet by Dvořák. The performances were outstanding and the acoustics are reportedly improved, but the ambience is that of a more formal winter concert, not that of a summer quasi-outdoor festival. Rather than pouring out of St. Nicholas Hall into the warm summer air at intermission (where free lemonade awaited us), we poured out into the cramped second floor lobby where we found the traditional wine and $2 Starbucks coffee being offered for sale. Before the concert, rather than stroll around a silent campus, aglow in the dying rays of sunset on a warm summer evening, we strolled around the less pastoral streets of downtown Seattle.

Granted, "different" isn't always "worse," and shouldn't be sensed that way. "Different" is merely "different," and I know we'll all learn to love the festival's new urban surroundings. After all, who'd complain, when attending a concert at Carnegie Hall, that the building's not surrounded by acres of green lawn?

Still, I feel nostalgic. The final two weeks of the festival continue to be held at Overlake School, east of the lake in Redmond. I may struggle across the bridge next year for just one of those performances. I've heard the campus is beautiful.