I visited one of my dear friends, violinist Julia Cash at Point Counterpoint music camp on the shores of Lake Dunmore, Vermont last week, where she is in her second summer of performing & teaching teenage musicians. A gorgeous spot on the Lake right at the foothills of the Green Mountains, the camp reminded me of a few summer camps I'd been a part of in my youth, with the bunkbeds, the practice cabins & right down to the family style communal dining. Part of the reason I was passing through also was to give a chamber orchestra workshop for the campers here who spend these summer weeks learning chamber music & taking lessons, and I showed up armed with my laptop, a projector and parts to Mozart's Divertimentos & the Holberg Suite by Edvard Grieg. I've been doing these sort of Power-point type presentations for a couple of different organizations starting this past fall, not only talking about A Far Cry and showing on & off-line examples of how we operate and manage, but showing our performance videos as a built in component to these workshops. (I mean, I spend enough hours editing and syncing these videos with high quality audio, I always end up wanting to show them to the public, especially to those who've never seen or heard of us..)
I think most of the kids at PCP really enjoyed the presentation. Quite frankly I was a little daunted having to lead a performance portion after the talk for these 50 or so youngsters, as more than half of them were sight reading the pieces I had brought with me. However to my surprise, they did so well!! A lot of them were able to follow the more complicated directions of dynamics & phrasings of these pieces by the 2nd and 3rd reading as I was thoroughly impressed. I spent my free time during these couple of days kayaking & swimming around Lake Dunmore & making new friends with the faculty and staff at PCP. It's nice to inspire young and raw talent, as I remember when I was at their stage, how much I was ready to soak in the great music & experiences that would come my way. And I have to say that I'm gladly and consistently surprised that so many kids I encounter are not only interested in classical music but have a genuine appreciation for it...It really is exciting to see. At our concerts, we definitely see a few more youngsters than some of the other venues around town, but still the majority of our loyal fans are the mature audiences. So I'm even more excited to have met these kids and plant the seed. I hope they tell all their friends, their siblings, cousins and their teachers at school and will come see one of our Jordan Hall concerts this next season.
