In the 1960s in St. Cloud, there was an organization known as the Civic Music Association. I have no idea when it started – there are references to it in online archives as early as 1932 – and I would guess it closed up shop sometime during the late 1960s. During the years the association was active, it sponsored about five concerts of generally classical or light classical music during each academic year.
That meant for about five years in the early and mid-1960s, I’d occasionally have to dress up to go to a concert. I didn’t mind going; I just didn’t see the point of putting on good slacks and shoes, a blazer and a necktie – a clip-on – on a weekday evening. But my sister and I would dress up a bit and then ride with Mom over to St. Cloud Tech High School and take our seats in the hard wooden chairs halfway up the grandstand in the auditorium/gym.
During the five or so years that we attended Civic Music-sponsored concerts, we saw and heard performances by some familiar names. I recall seeing Mantovani and his orchestra in concert; that was through Civic Music. I also remember concerts by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra), the piano duo of Stecher & Horowitz, the Robert Shaw Chorale, and for at least two years, season-ending performances by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
And I remember hearing Van Cliburn play. Cliburn was likely the biggest classical music star we saw and heard during our years of attending Civic Music events. I was about ten, so call it 1964, just six years after Cliburn had astonished the world of classical music by winning the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
I don’t remember much about the concert itself, just a glimmering image of Cliburn’s hands on the keyboard and the concentration on his face, that and a fleeting memory of wondering – spurred, no doubt, by my required daily half-hour of piano practice – how much time Van Cliburn spent practicing. What I do remember is his genuine smile and willingness to shake my small hand backstage after the concert and then to autograph a photo of himself that his publicist had handed me. (Despite careful searching, I cannot lay my hands on the photo; I’m sure it’s in a box in the garage or a folder in my files.)
I have vague memories of Mom telling me – maybe sometime around 1968 – that the Civic Music Association had folded. That wasn’t uncommon. A while back, I recalled that the piano duo of Melvin Stecher and Norman Horowitz came to St. Cloud at least twice. I clicked a few links and found a 2012 Wall Street Journal piece about the duo and their foundation. I read:
“When we toured in the 1950s, we played anything between 50 and a 100 concerts a year and a great deal of recitals,” says Mr. Stecher. “These community concert series have disappeared. Out of 3,000 that existed in America, there are maybe 200 or 300 left.”
St. Cloud’s concert series was one of those three thousand, and I’m probably not alone in thinking that whatever fondness I have for classical music – and it is there, eclipsed though it often might be by my affections for blues, soul, rock, pop and all the rest – comes at least in part from those evenings spent in hard, wooden auditorium chairs, wishing I could take off my clip-on tie and trying at the same time to absorb what I could from the gifted musicians up on the stage.
It’s quite likely that Van Cliburn was the most gifted of the musicians who visited St. Cloud for Civic Music during my years of attendance. Here’s his recording – I do not know the date; I’d guess sometime in the 1960s – of the third and best-known movement of Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamasque. It was written about 1890 and, Wikipedia says, was almost certainly revised significantly just prior to publication in 1905. During that revision, the movement’s title, as I understand it, was changed to “Claire de lune.”
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