Strong at 25 Killington Music Festival lineup is still a power
Toolbox
By JAMIE MUNKS Herald Correspondent - Published: June 28, 2007
he Killington Music Festival kicked off its 25th season Sunday with a garden party benefit to raise money for student scholarships.
The festival features chamber music and the faculty at Killington, who have played at venues around the world, and who play selections from composers such as Schubert, Brahms and Beethoven for the summer concert series.
Allison Eldredge, a faculty member of the New England Conservatory and a member of the Boston Trio, is returning as artistic director of the festival this year.
There is a large local following of the summer concert series, as well as people who travel from other areas of the Northeast to attend these concerts.
"This isn't just about the music and us being up on Killington," said Maria Napolitano-Fish, executive director of the festival. "We feel very much a part of the Rutland community. We have a local following from the Killington area and Rutland, but we also get people from New York and Boston who come up to us after concerts and say that they'd just been to Carnegie Hall and this was even better."
It isn't these people, however, that the music festival needs to attract — it's the people who don't think they'll enjoy this kind of music.
Napolitano-Fish said, "It's chamber music, and many people think its boring. It's great! It's sexy! But how do you convey that to people who don't want to hear it? Give it a chance."
The faculty members at Killington are the festival performers and the teachers for the students who come to Killington to study.
"The members of our faculty are young and dynamic artists," Napolitano-Fish said, "and they're world-renowned musicians — they've toured in Europe and played Carnegie Hall, and it continues to shock me that we have this group in Killington. But they're very accessible — they can often be found seeking out their students and sitting with them at meals."
There are more than 70 students age 12 to 26 coming from 23 different states and from as far as Taiwan to study with the faculty at Killington. The students do outreach concerts at local nursing homes and the correctional center, and they'll also be a part of Arts Alive on Friday nights in Rutland this year. "The students realize that they have this incredible gift and they want to give back to the community," Napolitano-Fish said.
She remembers the first time she took students to a nursing home and saw the effect of their music with her own eyes.
"I've seen research that says that chamber music relaxes you. The first time we went to a nursing home, I saw a woman who was visibly in pain. It was really quite hard to watch. But when they started playing, I saw pain disappear from her face," she said.
The festival will present the Music in the Mountains Concert Series beginning at 7 p.m. Saturday and will continue each Saturday thereafter through Aug. 11. The Killington Resident Artists will perform evenings weekly beginning at 7 p.m. Friday and will continue through July 27 with additional concerts July 31 through Aug. 2. The concerts are held at Rams Head Lodge at the Killington Ski Resort.
For more information about Master Classes and performances, visit www.killingtonmusicfestival.org.
55