Musical secret unveiled in Columbia County

The Associated Press

NEW LEBANON -- Maria Callas. Placido Domingo. Renee Fleming. Luciano Pavarotti. Herbert von Karajan.

These are some of the star musicians who have faced the camera of Christian Steiner -- ''the world's premier photographer of divas and conductors,'' as The New York Times has called him.

Steiner is also a pianist, born in Berlin to a prominent German musical family.

In this bucolic community, he combines his twin talents to create evenings of world-class chamber music featuring artists he has photographed, who appear for mere token fees.

On a recent Saturday, Metropolitan Opera star Ben Heppner offered two hours of German, French and Italian love songs. The Canadian tenor's heroic-scale voice boomed through the 19th-century tannery that Shakers once used to process leather, rinsing it in a tiny nearby pond.

Hence -- Tannery Pond, the name of the series.

''This music was written to be performed in this kind of intimate space,'' Heppner told spectators, as raindrops tapped the roof and darkness fell on the hills visible through the tannery windows.

On this muddy, wind-blown night, people arrived for the recital as if entering a neighbor's home, some stomping their feet at the door. During intermission, cookies, coffee, tea and wine were served on folding tables.

Friend to musicians

The scene is deceptively casual: Tannery Pond welcomes some of today's finest -- if not necessarily famous -- musicians who also happen to be Steiner's friends.

These days, he aims his lens at artists including Fleming, America's best known soprano, and one of the country's leading mezzo-sopranos, Susan Graham, who has sung at Tannery.

At home in Manhattan, the photographer keeps the Callas images he captured in the 1970s at the diva's Paris apartment.

''It was a Sunday morning. I rang her bell. The door opened and there was Maria Callas, in her bare feet, her hair almost down to her waist. And she said, 'I want you to tell my hairdresser how to do my hair for the photo. And could you also look at the clothes in my dressing room?''' he recalls of the elegant soprano who at the height of her career was dubbed ''La Divina'' -- the divine one.

That day's work produced photos that still grace Callas CDs sold in stores, a quarter century after her death. At the lower right hand corner of each image is a barely visible photo credit that reads: ''Christian Steiner.''

On weekends, he leaves his New York City apartment to serve as Tannery Pond's artistic director.

What Steiner has achieved is rare: Booking musicians who are usually paid five-figure fees per concert to perform at major venues like Carnegie Hall and the Met, or in Vienna, Paris or Tokyo, but who gladly appear in a quaint wooden house for what Steiner describes as ''a pittance'' -- after a two-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City.

He declines to cite the exact fees, and perhaps it's not important. They're here for the love of their art, in a tannery that later became a chapel, then home to thousands of bats until it was renovated in 1991.

A few of them still hid in nooks and crannies the day soprano Jessye Norman -- terrified of the airborne critters -- sang a benefit for Tannery Pond. In the audience was the late arts patron Alice Tully, who gave New York's Lincoln Center a chamber recital hall that bears her name. Money was raised that evening to spruce up the old Shaker tannery, install a small stage, new lighting and a backstage toilet.

Still, Tannery Pond remained all but a secret.

The half-dozen Saturday evening concerts, starting in spring and running through October, are not widely advertised. Word spreads through notices at the local grocery store or the library.

At $22 or $25 a ticket, available to anyone, Tannery Hall's long benches and wooden chairs seat about 300 people, including those peering from the balcony over a wrought iron bannister. The audience comes mostly from surrounding Columbia County, or from nearby Massachusetts, with a sprinkling of music lovers from New York City.

Steiner, 65, a tall, silver-haired man with an ever-ready smile, brings along his snow white dog Nikolai, whom he has dubbed ''The Czar of Tannery Pond.'' The Sealyham terrier sits and listens attentively during concerts.

Sometimes, Nikolai's master is on the stage, performing.

The renowned portrait photographer has recorded Ravel's ''La Valse'' and some Rachmaninoff pieces in a two-piano version with pianist Earl Wild; American Record Guide said his playing reflected ''a fine musical mind.''

As a youth in Berlin, Steiner had studied to become a concert pianist. His father was the principal violist of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and his two brothers joined the Berlin Philharmonic, as violist and cellist. While Steiner chose photography as a profession, he still occasionally sits at the keyboard for an audience. Recently, he accompanied Norman at one of her Manhattan vocal recitals, and was soloist for a Mozart piano concerto with the Mexico National Symphony Orchestra.

Musical greats who have appeared at Tannery Pond include pianists Richard Goode, Alicia de Larrocha and Jean-Yves Thibaudet; the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet; the Tokyo String Quartet; and the Berlin Philharmonic Octet.

Steiner is an equally ardent fan of budding new talent he invites to play upstate.

''The prerequisite for playing at Tannery Pond is excellence,'' he says of the performers. ''But then, it's fun. It's eating, drinking and breathing music.''

Columbia County ripe with offerings

A trip to Tannery Pond can be paired with visits to other interesting sites in and around Columbia County.

The county has a long and colorful history. Henry Hudson first visited in the early 1600s, establishing trade with the Indians.

The Shaker Museum in Old Chatham displays the lifestyle and traditions of the area's Shakers. And the Hancock Shaker Village on Route 20 -- about 5 miles away from New Lebanon in Pittsfield, Mass.-- is a museum village that features a round Shaker building.

The city of Hudson has become a center for antique dealers and collectors, with more than 65 shops along its main street.

Olana, the onetime home of the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, is now a museum overlooking the river, about one mile south of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge at Hudson.

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. -- about 45 minutes by car from New Lebanon -- is a fine collection of Impressionists, Old Masters and American painters.