Press
from the Greenwich Time, January 2008
Greenwich Music Festival wins national award
Adverturesome programming has earned The Greenwich Music Festival an award from Chamber Music America.
At its annual conference in New York City last week CMA presented the ASCAP Award for adventuresome program to Greenwich Music Festival founder Ted Huffman. The award honors excellence and innovation within the field of chamber music. Past recipients include the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. The Greenwich Music Festival is the first and only organization in the state of Connecticut to receive this coveted national prize.
"It is a great honor, and the first national recognition for the work we are doing in town," said Huffman, a Greenwich native and festival artistic director. "We set out from the start to build something truly ground-breaking and dynamic. Too often in this country we operate under the assumption that leadership and innovation in the arts has to originate in urban centers like New York. Greenwich, with its combination of highly-educated audiences, generous arts patrons, and excellent musical training in schools has proven an ideal place for our artists to live, share, and create."
The award, sponsored jointly by Chamber Music America and The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, is decided each year by a jury of industry leaders. The Greenwich Music Festival was chosen as this year's festival recipient along with the Music Series at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Both Huffman and representatives from Los Angeles participated in panel discussion about innovative programming and the importance of new music.
"It was a wonderful feeling to know we had been chosen along with an organization (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) that has been in existence for decades and has a vastly larger budget," Huffman also said. "We're also proud of the humble way we began and the rate at which we have grown. The first festivalheld just four years ago in 2004 - was produced with funds from the artists themselves. There were no salaries. We all wanted to be here. We all wanted to create this."
In addition to the award, the Greenwich Music Festival has announced that Mason Bates' "Red River," a work commissioned, developed and premiered at last year's festival will be performed Feb. 8 at the Ravinia Festival.
"Red River" was underwritten by Greenwich arts patrons Charles and Deborah Royce. Huffman says, "Without their vision and generosity, we wouldn't have had the means to produce this first commission, which was a very large and important step for our company."
The festival invites a group of artists-musical, dramatic and visual-to live, collaborate, and perform in Greenwich for one month each year. The artists live with host families, rehearse various projects, and bring outreach programs to local classrooms. The artists who receive GMF Residencies perform regularly as soloists with the opera companies, orchestras and festivals around the world including the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
The festival was founded by Huffman, a baritone and conductor Robert Ainsley. Huffman performs with opera companies and orchestras across the United States and Europe. Ainsley, who completed the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Program and is head of music for Portland Opera in Oregon, returns each year as principal conductor of the festival.
The 2008 festival in June will be anchored by three performances of Monteverdi's rarely-heard masterpiece "The Return of Ulysses." Additional programs will explore Monteverdi's role in musical history as innovator and rebel.