Beloved Musikfest mainstay Cast in Bronze returns from retirement to play milestone festival

One Sunday in the late 1980s, during his tenure as the carilloneur of the Washington Memorial Chapel, Frank DellaPenna forgot to lock the gate at the bottom of the bell tower. As he was up at the top, hammering away on the 58-bell carillon’s keyboard pegs, a stranger ascended the staircase.

“It was this huge hulk of a man,” DellaPenna said, speaking about the encounter at Valley Forge venue where years earlier he had first learned to play the instrument. The stranger stood nearly six and a half feet tall with a long ponytail, dressed in coveralls. DellaPenna didn’t often have visitors at the top of the tower, so this was disconcerting. “I thought ‘this guy’s going to kill me.’”

Instead, he gave him a new life.

The stranger, who DellaPenna said prefers to remain anonymous, was so impressed with his playing, that he found and bought the only existing carillon-on-wheels in the United States, trusting that DellaPenna would know what to do with it.

When the 35-bell carillon was delivered to the stranger’s warehouse, he gave DellaPenna a key to the warehouse and one directive: “take this thing out and see if you can make people like it.”

That was 1991, the year that Cast in Bronze was born.

Frank DellaPenna, the masked carillon player behind Cast in Bronze, performs on Handwerkplatz Aug. 4, 2023. He came out of retirement to return to Musikfest for the first time since 2014. DellaPenna, a world-renowned carilloneur, considers Musikfest to be his favorite place to perform.Saed Hindash | For lehighvalleylive.com

Now, in 2023, DellaPenna has been retired from traveling as Cast in Bronze since the pandemic, and his protege, Charlie St. Cyr-Paul has taken over the performance duties, albeit with a bit of a different flavor than DellaPenna. But the latter is donning his golden phoenix mask familiar to many Musikfest-goers one more time for the festival’s 40th anniversary. Cast in Bronze is playing the festival’s first weekend, so DellaPenna still has eight half-hour performances left, playing every hour on the hour at 6, 7, 8 and 9 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday at the Martin Guitar Handwerkplatz.

Cast in Bronze was last on the Musikfest schedule in 2014, the final year of a 16-year run of performing at the festival. But in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the festival, Musikfest organizers are bringing in elements from every era, which includes, apparently, what DellaPenna half-jokingly calls “vintage” acts.

When the call came in asking if he’d come back this year, it was a no-brainer, despite his status as retired.

“I have such a wonderful feeling about Musikfest and the people there who supported me all those years,” he said. “It was my favorite festival to play each year. When people ask me about my career, Musikfest was something really special to me.”

That’s high praise for someone who learned the instrument at the French Carillon School and has performed, he estimates, around 17,000 times — including for a pope, for presidential inaugurations, at Disney World, on national television and at festivals and events around the country.

But on Friday, it became pretty clear as to why DellaPenna’s felt this way for so long, as roughly 300 people gathered on the nondescript patch of gravel north of Handwerkplatz to watch “The Bell Guy” go to work. There were about a dozen rows of chairs, but those were filled well before the Cast in Bronze show began, so people began to fan out to the sides, standing, sitting on the ground or leaning on what little fencing was available.

It was barely hours into the start of Musikfest, and here was a rapt audience, ready for something they hadn’t seen in nearly a decade and clearly ecstatic about it. It is an extremely Musikfest

It’s difficult not to be completely bewitched by the Cast in Bronze show, from the carilloneur’s showmanship to the melodic, enveloping onslaught of the clanging bells. It’s hard to believe that DellaPenna’s first go at Musikfest happened on a stage and included additional members forming a band, because this perfected version — solo, just feet away from a willingly captive audience — feels like something that’s been around not just for 30-plus years, but maybe forever.

There were some members of that audience on Friday that got a strong hit of nostalgia from watching DellaPenna and his bells. Someone in the audience leaned over to their companion during the opening salvo of the show, noting that they got chills from hearing it again. One man turned to a friend and noted how great it was to have him back.

It’s not inconceivable that a child awestruck by Cast in Bronze at one of its earliest Musikfest shows in the 1990s now has children of their own they’re taking to Musikfest, and specifically to one of the weekend’s Cast in Bronze performances. The longevity of his own career and the continued appreciation for his work, especially at a place like Musikfest, means a lot to DellaPenna.

“I was there for so long that it spanned a generation,” he said. “These people who were maybe teenagers ended up parents and are bringing their own children. All those people got to experience the carillon. That’s cool to me. I don’t know what I did for them, but it was more about what they did for me. They’re always welcoming and always receptive, and they just made me feel good.”

That receptiveness can be hard to describe in words, but Cast in Bronze is difficult not to get swept up in. Harkening back to his years of anonymity up in the bell tower, DellaPenna has always wanted the spectacle to be about the bells, not himself, hence leaning into the mystery with the mask. The sight of this figure hammering away on the keyboard with this explosion of sound erupting from all 35 bells is perplexing, inviting and engrossing all at once.

DellaPenna has stories of teenagers chuckling and poking fun at his costume, only to become absolutely transfixed by the whole performance. He understands that, on its face, being “The Bell Guy” is going to pull some quizzical looks, but even the most skeptical of crowds can’t help but buy in after he starts playing.

There was no such skepticism at DellaPenna’s first show back, which was by all measures a success. He sounded good as always and there was a, by Musikfest standards, a huge audience. But the most special moment of the show came when it was over. For the first time in his career, after he stood for a final round of applause, he took off the mask.

“It’s about time people start seeing who I am,” he said to the crowd. After making the anonymity such a crucial part of the show for decades, pulling back the proverbial curtain back gave both him and his crowd of dedicated Musikfest fans a connection they’d both been missing for quite some time.

Frank DellaPenna, the masked carillon player behind Cast in Bronze, bows his head to the audience after removing his mask for the first time, he claims, after performing on Handwerkplatz Aug. 4, 2023. He came out of retirement to return to Musikfest for the first time since 2014. DellaPenna, a world-renowned carilloneur, considers Musikfest to be his favorite place to perform.Saed Hindash | For lehighvalleylive.com

After he thanked them for their support, not just that night but over the years he was regularly coming to the festival, he stepped down from the carilloneur, and a good handful of the crowd came forward for a picture, offer a tip or to simply say “thank you for coming back.”

There were people he recognized — he sized up one young man, saying “look at you, you got big!” — but mostly people he didn’t, and frankly, given his history of using the mask specifically for this reason, maybe they didn’t recognize him either. But there was some mutual understanding that, for both carilloneur and festival-goer, this was a special moment.

DellaPenna sat on the steps of his trailer after his first performance was over, rehydrating after playing in the swampy Friday humidity. He joked that he had no idea if the rest of his shows would be even close to that well-attended. But, he noted more seriously, even just one show with that level of enthusiasm was enough for him to make his return to Musikfest worth it, to see this specific subset of his supporters again.

But what he didn’t see on the other side of the trailer was, a good half-hour before show No. 2, the rows of seats were already mostly full.

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Connor Lagore may be reached at [email protected].

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Beloved Musikfest mainstay Cast in Bronze returns from retirement to play milestone festival