Voxare at Green Gables

Green Gables, one of Bernardsville Mountain’s most storied mansions, will be the venue for a chamber concert at 5 PM on Sunday, May 22.  The concert is part of the annual season of concerts presented by Music in the Somerset Hills and will be played by one of this country’s most exciting young chamber ensembles, the Voxare String Quartet.

Green Gables is the home of the Fox family.  The house, with its distinctive green-glazed tile roof, was originally built in 1903 by Baron Frederick de Bary as a wedding present for his granddaughter Leonie and her husband George Cross (who would later become the very first Mayor of Bernardsville).  The de Barys were an ancient Huguenot family who left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and lived for many years in Germany before Baron Frederick moved to America in 1851.  He did so at the request of his friend Georges Mumm who needed a “sole agent in the United States” to sell his family’s champagne – something Baron Frederick did with conspicuous success.  Having built splendid homes for himself in Florida and Summit, N.J., it was the Baron’s greatest pleasure to buy an 83-acre plot in the Mine Mountain section of Bernardsville, and to commission the New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury to build on it a 30-room fieldstone manor house for his granddaughter and her new husband.  Decorations and furnishings were, of course, by Tiffany.

The newly married couple called their new home Baricross – a combination of their two names – and they lived there for 23 years until Leonie’s sudden death in 1928.  It was the new owners, the Hummels – or rather, their ten-year-old daughter Ellen (later Ellen Hummel Vreeland) – who decided to change the name to Green Gables.

The Voxare String Quartet, who will play at Green Gables on May 22, came together as a quartet in 2008.  Its members – two men and two women, two Americans and two Russians – have performed individually as soloists with some of the great orchestras of America – the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and many more.  As a quartet, they have a repertoire that spans five centuries, and they are not afraid to break down the traditional boundaries of classical music.  They have made and performed their own transcriptions of popular and rock music, and they have made a specialty of presenting innovative concerts focused on contemporary chamber music which assimilates both classical standards and popular music.  In the words of Ned Rorem, the Pultizer Prize-winning composer, “the Voxare Quartet is probably the best American chamber group performing today”.