{"id":15072,"date":"2019-05-09T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/?p=15072"},"modified":"2019-05-08T16:12:33","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T22:12:33","slug":"the-nostalgia-and-excitement-of-a-summer-music-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/the-nostalgia-and-excitement-of-a-summer-music-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nostalgia and Excitement of a Summer Music Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Peter Oundjian, Music Director<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t wait to be in the throes of a summer festival again. It\u2019s one of my absolute favourite things about spending a life as a classical musician, and it\u2019s something that\u2019s been missing from my life for too long. Summer programs and festivals have had a profound impact on my career path, my friendships, and my journey through life, and the Colorado Music Festival is a bright new chapter in a big book that had begun to gather some dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a long season of\nmaking music with our home teams, many musicians take the opportunity to get\nout of town for a while and join a new squad for the summer. Kids everywhere go\noff to camp for a month or two in the summer. The best part about it is that\nit’s not like school at all; there\u2019s a wonderful informality at camp. The\nfrightening speed of summer injects an immediate collegial atmosphere into camp\nlife. You become nostalgic about it long before it\u2019s even over, and you hold on\nto every day a little more tightly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summer festivals have very much the same feeling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same instant, urgent bond tends to naturally take hold of a group of people who get to share a wonderful thing together for only a few weeks. There\u2019s the same freshness, the same spontaneity, the same reminder that everything is temporary, that this summer is soon going to be another summer you\u2019ll never get to live again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up playing the\nviolin, and had a career as a chamber musician before turning to conducting in\nthe mid-1990s. I may not have had the opportunity to do so if not for the\nconnections I made at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, a festival I cherish\nas much as any musical place in my memory. But every summer of my life spent\nplaying at grown-up band camps is special in its own way, and it started almost\n50 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was in high\nschool in England, I spent a summer at my first music camp. It was in Petworth,\nWest Sussex, an idyllic little town of not more than a couple thousand people.\nIt presented an opportunity to make music with people from all over the south\nof England \u2014 people who were like me, and who had spent their young lives\ncommitting themselves to the same craft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My experience at\nPetworth gave me a craving that has remained with me ever since. A few years\nlater, I was studying at the Juilliard School and was invited to Meadowmount, a\nfamous festival for string players in upstate New York for the summer of 1976.\nThis was a more focused environment than I had at Petworth. We\u2019d perform both\nchamber music and solo pieces every week. Meadowmount created a truly collegial\nenvironment among young musicians \u2014 everybody understood each others\u2019 nerves\nand anxieties. When it was your turn to step on stage, you felt a huge wave of\nsupport. It brought out the best in us. It reminded us why we were spending our\ndays chasing a career in the craft we took up as children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following summer, I\nattended Chamber Music West in San Francisco. The festival\u2019s founder, Milton\nSalkind, became a lifelong friend. Chamber Music West was different in that it\ncombined students from top programs in the country with well-renowned artists\nfrom all over the world to form each chamber group. This was the first festival\nwith which I developed a lasting relationship. I attended Chamber Music West\nfor four straight summers (\u201977-\u201980), and returned twice in the \u201980s as a member\nof the Tokyo String Quartet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tokyo String\nQuartet brought me to a slew of summer festivals. In 1985, we attended the\nKuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Kuhmo, Finland, a small town near the Russian\nborder. I made so many dear friends in such a short period of time, many of\nwhom I am still performing with today. My memory often tricks me into thinking\nI must have spent longer than a week there \u2014 possibly because the sun never\nsets in that part of Finland in July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned the Norfolk\nChamber Music Festival, which is a summer getaway in Litchfield, Connecticut\nunder the auspices of the Yale School of Music. I have been teaching at Yale\nfor 38 years, and Norfolk was such a perfect place to connect with students in\na relaxed, informal environment. We played all day, had huge barbecues together\nin the late afternoons, and supported each others’ performances come nighttime.\nI spent 14 years with the Tokyo String Quartet, and we attended Norfolk during\nevery single summer of my time with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was at Norfolk where\nI met Howard Herring, who was the Associate Director of Chamber Music America\nat the time. We became close very quickly, and he was the first person I\nconfided in about feeling I had to stop my violin career. It was 1994 and I was\nbeginning to accept that I was no longer to play at the same level due to a\nrepetitive stress injury I had sustained in my left hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon after that, Howard\ntook over as the Executive Director of the Caramoor Centre for Music and the\nArts. He and Andre Previn gave me my first opportunity as a conductor just one\nmonth after I closed the book on my violin career in the summer of 1995. Within\ntwo years, I succeeded Andre as Music Director at Caramoor. This became one of\nthe foundations of my conducting career, and it was the first place I got to\ncreate programs and curate entire summers of music. I am forever grateful to\nHoward and Andre, and to Caramoor and Norfolk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since I left Caramoor\nin 2003, I\u2019ve performed at many summer festivals, and I’ve enjoyed all of them.\nBut I haven\u2019t been intimately involved with one in over 15 years \u2014 I haven\u2019t had\na chance to fulfill that craving. I\u2019ve missed it immensely, and as the summer\nnears, I\u2019m starting to get that same ball of excitement in my stomach that I\nused to get before all of those summers that have altered the course of my life\nso beautifully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wonderful thing about a summer festival is that you move to a new town and get to experience living in that community for a little while. You become a small part of the place, and in turn, the place becomes a part of your identity and a part of your growth. I will hold all of these places very close to my heart for the rest of my life. The opportunity to develop close relationships to the Colorado Music Festival and the city of Boulder is very meaningful to me. And amidst all this reflection and nostalgia, I feel tremendous excitement for what\u2019s to come!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope to see you this summer at Colorado Music Festival, the new focus of my passion for summer festivals! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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by Peter Oundjian, Music Director I can\u2019t wait to be in the throes of a summer festival again. It\u2019s one of my absolute favourite things about spending a life as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":15079,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}