|
http://www.newportmusic.org
<< visit website
Categories: Arts & Culture, [ view all ]
The Newport Music Festival Charity Profile
The Newport Music Festival was founded in 1969 as an attempt by the Metropolitan Opera to establish a summer season in Newport, much like the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. However, outdoor opera is not a natural for Newport—the fog rolled in, the sopranos couldn’t sing, and an instrument literally fell apart on stage.
What did happen, however, is that a few far-sighted, creative persons visited Newport’s extraordinary mansions and realized the possibility of performing chamber music in the kind of grand rooms for which that music had originally been written. The early Festival utilized many members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and was the forerunner of the Romantic revival, so popular now worldwide.
Approaching its 37th season, the Newport Music Festival still offers music of the Romantic era—roughly 1825-1900—but in recent years it has expanded the dates and now presents a wide spectrum, from Bach to Berio. The Festival has had dozens of world premieres of contemporary composers as well as rare discoveries of forgotten minor masterpieces. For instance, the Festival presented the world premiere of a four-hand Andante Cantabile by Claude Debussy, found in manuscript at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and an unknown Prelude of Rachmaninoff found at the Library of Congress in Washington. To date the Festival has presented over 1,600 concerts and 800 artists.
 |
|
The Newport Music Festival
