The Berkshire High Peaks Festival has never settled down. Founded in 2010 in Hunter and Tannersville, New York, by cellist Yehuda Hanani as an informal extension of conservatory music study—shared meals, hikes, and “serious immersion” for a small circle of students who didn’t want their training to end with the semester—the festival has since moved through the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, the Berkshire School in Sheffield, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington.
This summer, July 22–August 3, it lands at The Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York, on the mountainside campus of the former Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, a National Historic Landmark nestled between the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires.
Darrow’s 365-acre campus, dressed in stone and timber, original Shaker buildings and wooded trails, has weathered its own recent uncertainty—the school nearly closed in 2024 before a community fundraising effort pulled it back from the brink—which gives this particular pairing of itinerant music festival and recently rescued historic campus a certain resonance.
Hanani, who directs the festival as the educational arm of his Berkshires-based chamber series “Close Encounters With Music,” has described the festival’s founding ethos in straightforward terms. “When I was approached by a group of students to continue our conservatory work informally over the summer, this was meant to be personal, non-institutional, with shared meals, hikes and enjoying the beauty of the Hudson Valley and Berkshires as a backdrop to serious immersion,” he has said. “We began with strings, added piano, and recently a vocal department, but have managed to retain the spontaneity and freshness of our origins.”…