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There was a time, 40 years ago or more, when if you wanted to hear the Boys Choir of Harlem, you had to go to the Church of the Intercession in New York City. To see Dizzy Gillespie blow his famous trumpet, you would line up with other jazz fans at Fat Tuesday in the East Village. Beverly Sills? The Metropolitan Opera.
Or, if you were in Rockbridge, you could see each of them and countless other performing artists with household names in the Virginia Military Institute’s fieldhouse, thanks to an improbable organization called the Rockbridge Concert-Theater Series, RCTS.
Founded in 1945 by the legendary Mary Monroe Penick, music director for Lexington’s schools and the Presbyterian Church, and soon joined by Col. Fitzgerald H. “Pinky” Barksdale, executive officer at VMI, the series brought entertainment to Rockbridge that most communities a hundred times the size of Rockbridge seldom saw.
And none of the RCTS’s guests were more popular, nor more enthusiastic about returning year after year, than the musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra. In one pre-Interstate November, they even arranged their own schedules so they could vote and then bump their way down U.S. 11 to Lexington in time to make their performance.
The orchestra’s Lexington trademark was the magical “Peter and the Wolf,” written in 1936 by Sergei Prokofiev. As many as 4,000 children at a time packed the VMI fieldhouse to hear the “symphonic fairy tale for children.” Most of them marched there from local schools or rode in from schools in neighboring counties.
The story of the RCTS, “The Day the Orchestra Came to Town,” is told by two of those former children in the latest “Rockbridge Epilogue.” The coauthors are Suzanne Barksdale Rice, daughter of Col. Barksdale, and Anne Drake McClung, daughter of George Francis Drake, professor of French at Washington and Lee University, who was the customary narrator of “Peter and the Wolf.”
The authors recount the founding of RCTS and its growth as it attracted the biggest-name performers of serious music and stage plays. And they interview almost a dozen area residents who vividly recall attending RCTS performances, mainly of “Peter and the Wolf.”
Among the article’s illustrations is a fanciful painting by the late Marion Montague Junkin, well-known artist and founder of W&L’s art department, showing Professor Drake on stage in costume as the wolf, with Howard Mitchell, conductor of the symphony orchestra, and a dozen of its instrumentalists.
“The Day the Orchestra Came to Town” can be read without charge at www.HistoricRockbridge.org. It is the 43rd in the six-year-old series that publishes interesting and important articles of Rockbridge history that do not appear in print elsewhere.
