Music fest offers 16th digital concert
The Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival will stream its 16th digital concert on Sunday starting at 11 a.m.
The event is open to the public, but audience members must register through the festival’s website at www. TrinityAlpsCMF.org. Admission is on a “pay-what-youcan” sliding scale.
The year 2020 was set to be a big year for the organization that started as a wilderness-rehearsal-retreat for professional musicians, and has evolved into a “touring festival” that has presented over 400 live concerts across the Western United States. This is the 10th season of the organization, started in 2011 by pianist/adventurer/impresario Ian Scarfe and violinist/farmer/retreat-host Ellen McGehee.
The festival had big plans, as so many musicians and organizations did for 2020 prior to the pandemic. However, never one to give up, Scarfe — who serves as festival director — quickly adapted to the new realities of life during the pandemic, and began offering digital concerts that streamed live online back in early May.
“At first it felt like such a grand experiment,” said Scarfe, “We were like everyone else in the world, dealing with this incredibly steep learning curve of discovering how technology could salvage some part of our lives and careers.”
At first, the digital concerts were a way to help the very musicians who were invited to participate in the retreats, residencies and tours that the organization had planned for 2020, 35 professional musicians from around the U.S. and Europe.
“We recognized early on that we had an obligation to our musicians. Most of us had lost virtually all our work and income in the spring of 2020, and there were no signs of how or when it would come back. I decided that I would commit to hiring all of our musicians anyway, and we would try our best to stream performances from the safety of our homes, hoping that the audience would follow and the support would materialize.” said Scarfe.
The audience did follow, with the first six concerts each drawing over 100 audience members, often from surprisingly far away.
“At our first program, we had audience members from Alaska, New York, and Florida, who had been to our concerts in California in previous years. We also had people tuning in from Texas, Illinois, and even Ireland, people who had never attended a concert before, but had heard about us online,” said Scarfe, “The digital concerts, if anything, have actually brought in new fans of this organization, and all of our musicians have benefitted from that.”
Since then, the organization has managed to hire all of the musicians originally scheduled to appear in 2020, as well as about a dozen more. The “pay-whatyou- can” donation model has both inspired generosity from music lovers, and also allowed their programs to remain accessible to people dealing with economic hardships, and even allow people who are unsure what to expect to sample live classical music.
On Sunday at 11 a.m., the festival will present its 16th and final digital concert of 2020, with a program theme of “Night Music: Songs, Carols and Dreamscapes.” Fitting the theme of both the winter solstice, the longest nights of the year and the Christmas week, the concert will feature performances by soprano Amy Foote, who will accompany herself on autoharp and harmonium, pianist Britton Day, who will perform Australian composer Carl Vine’s atmospheric and challenging Piano Sonata No. 1, and festival director Ian Scarfe, who will present Nocturnes and other night-music by Chopin, Grieg, and more.
More information about the festival and the concert can be found at www.TrinityAlpsCMF.org.