If your Palm Beach County July has been a little less musical than normal, you’re not imagining things.
The Palm Beach County Chamber Music Festival, which has presented concerts each summer since 1992, went on hiatus this year, primarily because of a lack of funds. But the organizers of the group say they want to be back in the summer of 2024, and are mounting a fundraising campaign to do so.
Karen Fuller, a flutist and one of the three founders of the festival, said she and her colleagues had decided in April against presenting concerts this summer, and had planned to bring an end to the project. Until the COVID pandemic, the festival offered 12 concerts, three each on four weekends throughout July.
“We were pretty much ready to just say, you know, we had a good run. And were getting ready to send out some sort of ‘thank you for all your support over the years’-type letter,” she said in a Zoom interview earlier this month.
But co-founder Michael Forte, a clarinetist, met a retired corporate communications executive at a baseball spring training game who told him he was a fan of the festival and volunteered to help. Tim Pagel wrote in an email interview that he has been attending Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival concerts for more than 20 years and considers it one of the county’s best-kept secrets.
More:Love Broadway shows? Here’s the list of what’s on tap for the Kravis next season
“I often think this is the best professional musical ensemble nobody’s ever heard of, and (it’s) right in our backyard. We need to change that,” he wrote.
Pagel has set a goal of raising $25,000 by the end of August, and is suggesting different approaches for a festival return, including partnerships with other artistic institutions such as the Norton Museum of Art.
“How about a public courtyard performance in Palm Beach? What about getting recordings into area hospitals, 55+ community activity rooms, or public squares (with appropriate recognition, of course)? And the festival has barely scratched the surface of the power of social media,” he wrote.
“My hope is to add some structure and support to the team, help them get back on sound financial footing, give them some new ideas to think about, and hopefully broaden their reach into some heretofore underserved communities,” Pagel wrote. “The festival has huge unrealized potential, and whichever direction(s) the founders and their fellow musicians are willing to take it, I’ll be there to support them.”
Fuller said the festival ran into trouble with the COVID-19 pandemic, replacing its summer 2020 concerts with short video performances, and in summer 2021, playing brief programs to audiences of restricted size.
“Those two summers just really did us in,” she said. “It’s not something I think we predicted was going to happen.”
Last year, the organization could afford to present only one weekend of concerts. And it’s likely that any revived festival will not feature four weekends of performances as in the past, because such a commitment has become too grueling for the musicians.
“We’ve loved the 30 years that we had. But I mean, it was exhausting … At the end of every summer, we were just dead at the end,” Fuller said. “I think that now we’ll be able to enjoy it more if it’s a little bit more bite-size.”
Persons interested in donating to the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival can visit www.pbcmf.org or the festival’s special GoFundMe page at www.gofundme.com/f/reinvigorate-palm-beach-chamber-music-festival.
Earlier this year, Canadian rock legends THE GUESS WHO shared their brand new LP, "Plein D'Amour", via Deko Entertainment. They now continue their album rollout with the release of a brand new video for the single "People Around Me".On "Plein D'Amour", bandmembers Derek Sharp, Michael Staertow, Leonard Shaw, Michael Devin and founding member Garry Peterson have crafted a collection of songs that raises the bar and continues to take it up a notch both musically and sonically. The album was […]
