BETHEL, N.Y., July 2 — The Turks built mosques over churches. The Italians built churches over Roman temples. America has sacred sites of its own, and over one is rising the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
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Opening night at the Bethel Center for the Arts, where Woodstock once lured rock 'n' roll zealots.
Elegantly appointed and landscaped, with commanding views of inviting countryside, and far removed from the mud, chaos, euphoria and chemical wooziness for which its location is remembered, Bethel Woods will serve as a slicked-down, spruced-up memorial to a place as biblically significant to rock 'n' roll as Noah's Flood or Exodus: the Woodstock Festival of 1969.
Summer programs began at Bethel Woods Saturday night and with an uprightness that Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and those VW busloads of worshipful zealots 37 years ago might not have understood. This was "Woodstock for the Capri-pants set," as a companion described it.
Ghosts of the past may have lingered over the evening, but in the flesh it was the New York Philharmonic, there to give this send-off class. Gershwin, Broadway and popular classics, along with jokes and patter by the evening's conductor, Bramwell Tovey, were received by upscale patrons in the 4,800-seat covered pavilion and by larger, more casual crowds of picnickers and lawn sitters to the rear. The festival press release says it has room for 12,000 of the latter and also that this opening night was sold out.
The singer Audra McDonald had the burden of star power shifted fully on her back when the fellow celebrity Lang Lang reported in the day before saying he was feeling ill and could not play the piano. Vanishing star-pianists (Lang Lang was replaced by young Alexander Kobrin) were not the only potential obstacles to this opening.
One noticed scattered signs of groundskeepers having coped (and very well) with the previous week's torrential rains. The smooth green lawns, slopes and walkways seem largely to have escaped the flooding that sent mud pouring down the main streets of nearby towns, undermined trees and gouged holes in roads.
Bethel Woods' outbuildings and public spaces sit on a plateau overlooking the original Woodstock site, with the performance space on an adjacent slope. The stage acoustics are, if anything, clear. The overbearing brass presence may have had at least as much to do with Mr. Tovey's tastes as it did with acoustical architecture. I found Ms. McDonald overamplified, but the extra electrical boost was in keeping with this handsome, articulate singer and her high-intensity musical salesmanship.
Mr. Kobrin's meek exterior concealed a confident virtuoso. He is from Moscow and demonstrated the unflappability of the successful competition warrior that he is. Rachmaninoff's familiar "Paganini" Variations are mother's milk for a player of his training and culture, making this an unexpected career opportunity seized and well used. The Philharmonic played with great enthusiasm.
Things at Bethel Woods will not usually be so staid. The Goo Goo Dolls and Counting Crows will show up in August and, shortly after,
an evening of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Ashlee Simpson appears next weekend, and two weeks after that will be a Saturday and Sunday of jazz with Wynton Marsalis, George Benson and various groups.
Bethel Woods is largely the creation of Alan Gerry, a local man who made a fortune in cable television, bought the Woodstock site through his Gerry Foundation 10 years ago and added 1,700 surrounding acres. The construction work, he said on Saturday night, had been done in a remarkable 23 months and largely by local citizens. Total cost is estimated at $70 million.
For city people the trip is only a few hours and not much of a slog. The last mile is the problem: narrow country lanes that were clogged nearly to a standstill a full hour and a half before concert time. (One can only imagine the 400,000 who arrived for Woodstock in the rain in 1969.) Bethel Woods' traffic engineers are going to have some head scratching to do.
Too much can be made of comparing the magnificent scruff of the old festival and the new. Woodstock could only happen once. This is a different time. Political and artistic nerve endings seem more dazed than raw. Most people want their comforts. They want their "1812" Overture and their holiday fireworks. Think of Woodstock as a slightly fading palimpsest over which the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is writing in a new and legible hand.
