by Jon Turner
It was the mid-point of Stern Grove Festival’s ten-week season, and other than a talkative hawk somewhere up in the eucalyptus, backstage was quiet. I was gearing up in “my office” (a folding table set among the mulch and nasturtiums) when a sprinter van rolled slowly past me up to the stage door.
Béla Fleck stepped out, declined an offer of help with his banjo, and walked directly onto the stage, past the chairs and music stands and space heaters. He sat down front and center at a gold microphone and started playing to an empty grove. Everything stopped. His 1937 banjo danced and bounced up into the canopy, and the only people hearing it were a handful of stagehands waiting on their radios for the next command.
Every artist has their own way of arriving at Stern Grove. Some, wary of being seen before the show, ask for black out curtains to be hung or entire areas to be kept clear. Others stay in the bus or the greenroom until showtime. Others are gregarious and openly stoked, taken with the place. Almost all of them need help getting gear in. There are usually amps to haul, entire villages going up onstage to house and retune instruments. Fleck brought a banjo and carried it himself.
Nearly five decades and 18 Grammys in, he’s played with everyone from Victor Wooten to Jerry Garcia to Yo-Yo Ma. After soundcheck he and conductor Edwin Outwater walked up to the Trocadero House for a “Troc Talk” in front of a small audience, where they discussed the complications of mixing orchestral rhythmic time-feels with bluegrass.
Onstage, Outwater and the Symphony opened with Bernstein’s “Overture to Candide,” Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in Ravel’s orchestration, and Barber’s “The School for Scandal Overture,” threaded through with Outwater’s characteristic charm and playfulness. Fleck joined for the last two. First “Rhapsody in Blue” — his own arrangement, built for the piece’s 1924 centennial, which he recorded with the Virginia Symphony in 2024. He didn’t reorchestrate it; he took Gershwin’s piano part onto the banjo, changing notes where he had to, distilling the piece to fit on a banjo’s limited range. Then Copland’s “Hoe-Down,” to close.
Stern Grove in July is usually a rumor of a place. The fog settling high in the eucalyptus, everyone under a blanket by two o’clock. That afternoon the sun came all the way down into the bowl. When the last of “Hoe-Down” went up into the canopy, it went the same way it had at one o’clock, when the only people listening were a hawk and a few stagehands. There were over ten thousand of us this time. It sounded exactly the same.
