Enthusiasm for the Seattle Chamber Music Festival is 25 years strong

The Seattle Chamber Music Festival turns 25 this summer, and balloons are already being blown and celebratory cakes baked in time for opening night Monday at Lakeside School.

Also on the ready are some 40 musicians, an increase of 30 over the inaugural year, including founding artistic director Toby Saks.

The cellist remembers well the beginning of the festival, and is quick to tell the tale. Violinist Paul Rosenthal, a colleague of Saks in New York before she moved to Seattle to join the music faculty at the University of Washington in 1976, suggested to her she should start a festival in Seattle as he had done in a far less likely place -- Sitka, Alaska.

She was astonished at the idea. "I had never done anything like that. You practice, win competitions and hope for a career. Musicians did not begin festivals. Paul was an anomaly. But I was interested and picked his brain. He gave me all sorts of advice, which included talking to everyone I could."

Among them was Maxine Cushing Gray, dean of West Coast critics who published the fortnightly journal Northwest Arts. "She could be crusty but was nice. We talked and talked. She was very encouraging and we drove around looking at various sites. Nothing quite seemed to fit my perception of a place for a summer festival. At the time my daughter was looking at schools, one of which was Lakeside. When I went there for a visit, I knew this was the place."

And so it was, with its well-groomed campus and tidy brick buildings, all suggestive of East Coast prep schools.

Very quickly, the idea turned to reality. Saks connected with Meade Emory, then a well-known tax lawyer, who eventually became the festival's founding president, staying for five years, and established the organizational base that has served the festival so well. Also integral in those early days were Arlene Wade and Jeanne Ehrlichman Bleuchel, active in the music community.

"They were so enthusiastic, convinced that the community would support such an endeavor that I swear in a few weeks the festival was practically up and running." The year was 1981 and nine months later, in June, the festival opened its first season.

Six concerts were held over two weeks. Some patrons ate catered dinners on white tablecloths and others did picnics on the lawn. The sun was hot and the sky a cerulean blue. St. Nicholas Hall was packed with some of the most familiar faces in the Seattle social scene. Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other representatives of the chamber music canon were performed. The budget was a modest $40,000, compared with $916,000 this year.

The first season was an unquestionable success and the festival launched. Before long, it was considered an institution. Seattle being Seattle, that meant it was open to criticism: The repertory was too conventional; not all the musicians were first rank; it was too elitist.

Festival officials, including Saks, paid attention but soldiered on. Concerts were generally sold out and contributions continued. The festival has always operated in the black. In only a few years, the Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule was amplified to its current four-week season. Pre0concert recitals, in the intimate McKay Chapel, were added, as were occasional extra concerts.

When expansion at Lakeside was deemed impossible, because of the school's own agenda, the festival added a January winter festival. Last year, the festival opened an Eastside branch at Overlake School in Redmond -- two weeks with different programs and some different musicians -- to follow the Seattle festival. To accommodate the ever-growing nature of the festival, its official name was changed to the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Saks said in those first years, she never thought of the long-range future. "I was so absorbed with the newness of inviting musicians to play, figuring out the repertory, who was going to play with whom, what color the stationery should be, the image on the annual poster, hoping the weather would be good. This was a mom-and-pop operation."

At first the musicians Saks invited were known to her personally. Eventually with so many musicians and the need to keep inviting new ones -- a mandate of the board, she said -- she began to rely on others, often musicians at the festival, a system that prevails in festivals around the world, especially where collaboration is such a key element.

Many aspects of the festival remarkably have not changed. All musicians are paid the same artistic fee, stay in private houses and are given a rental car. Since Saks' marriage to physician Martin Greene 19 years ago, their spacious house has become a center of the festival -- a place for rehearsals, which sometimes include neighbors, and meals.

What is new this season is a commissioning club in which members make a financial commitment for three years, the result of which is a new work every year. After that, Saks said, the project will be examined.

Saks signed a new five-year contract as artistic director in March. However, in subsequent seasons she will play a lot less, if at all, at her festival. "I am an elder statesman at the UW. I have a lot of students (including Julian Schwarz, son of Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz), I sit on a lot of committees, I prepare 27 programs a year and hire dozens of musicians. So my priorities are shifting. I would like to be able to relax more at the festival, visit with the audience, be more of a Speight Jenkins (general director of Seattle Opera)."

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