Round Top’s music fest is the subject of a new book

Carl Cunningham's 'Festival Hill at 50' chronicles the birth and life of the classical-music event that is the Texas equivalent of Aspen or Tanglewood festivals.

By Chris Gray, HoustonChronical.com July 11, 2022

In the summer of 1976, a classic Texas thunderstorm turned the pastures of northern Fayette County into a quagmire. The downpour was bad news for the fledgling Round Top Music Festival, which had just moved to its brand-new Festival Hill campus from Henkel Square in the picturesque hamlet that supplied its name.

After the rains, it was in poor shape to put on an outdoor concert until a clutch of local farmers came to the rescue.

“Here they were the morning of the concert, spreading that hay all over the ground so that the people wouldn’t get their feet and shoes all muddy when they went to sit down in the chairs,” recalls Carl Cunningham, who was there as the performing-arts critic for the Houston Post.

Still better known as an antiquing destination, Round Top is now a significant name within international classical music circles as well. The current edition of the festival runs through July 16.

How it got that way is the subject of Cunningham’s handsome new book, “Festival Hill at Fifty: The History of the Round Top Festival Institute,” which took him eight and a half years to complete. It overlapped a little with his previous coffee-table volume, 2013’s “Houston Symphony 100: Celebrating a Century.”

Published by Herring Press (also based in Fayette County), his book goes into great detail as it lays out the shoestring origins of the Festival Institute; its growth into something of a Texas-accented rival to the larger Aspen and Tanglewood festivals; and its harmonious relationship with the surrounding rural communities. But it all starts with James Dick.

A native of Hutchinson, Kan., Dick showed a childhood talent for piano. After studying music at the University of Texas at Austin and London’s Royal Academy of Music, he placed well in a handful of international competitions and began a soloist career. One day, Miss Ima Hogg, the legendary Texas philanthropist and founder of the Houston Symphony, invited him to perform a handful of concerts at her Round Top home and the nearby converted barn she had recently donated to UT, which continues to host the university’s Shakespeare at Winedale festival.

In June 1971, Dick inaugurated a two-week piano workshop for 10 students that shuttled between Henkel Square and the Winedale barn. His friend Richard Royall, a lawyer and Houston native, came aboard as managing director and helped establish the festival’s controlling nonprofit, the James Dick Foundation. Royall, who died in 2019, handled the business affairs while Dick leveraged his network of musical contacts to fill out the festival’s faculty, such as Yo-Yo Ma in 1977 and ’78. He also made use of certain nonmusical talents.

“Jimmy was very successful as a fundraiser, in meeting people and persuading them to donate to the festival,” says Cunningham. “When he settled here, he performed all around the area, and so he met people in this area and basically built its reputation that way.”

To accommodate the growing demand for rehearsal space, eating and sleeping quarters, and other necessities, the foundation purchased a 6-acre plot a mile north of town. Besides restoring the few buildings that were already on the property, including the segregation-era Round Top Colored School, older buildings in surrounding towns were acquired and moved to Festival Hill, including a Victorian house from Hempstead and an old Methodist church from La Grange.

It was quite a sight for the visiting students and faculty who had shown up expecting tumbleweeds and sagebrush.

“This part of Texas is not like that,” Cunningham says. “The fields are green and the people are pleasant, and so they really relished the fact they’d come to this tiny town and spend six weeks having a good time meeting each other (and) enjoying each other’s company. It was a refreshing experience for them.”

Other buildings on Festival Hill — which now stretches for more than 200 acres — were built from scratch. The 1,001-capacity Concert Hall was operational for decades during a piecemeal construction process that finally ended in 2007. Cunningham recalls a “glorious” performance of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe suite at that season’s opening-night concert.

Fifteen years later, Festival Hill hums year-round, thanks to its August-to-April series, which includes theater, poetry and herbal forums; a holiday “Nutcracker” performance; and a spring recital by Dick, who at 82 remains the festival’s artistic director. (This year’s edition closes July 16.) Round Top has become synonymous with combining world-class music with down-home hospitality, all just a two-hour drive from Houston.

“There’s hardly a sign or anything out there, but on the weekends, there’ll be a little sign saying ‘concert tonight’ and ‘concert today,’” says Cunningham. “If you turn in the driveway, you are in a whole new environment all of a sudden, and you discover this little oasis that is out there amidst the hayfields.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.