Chamber Music Festival Features Favorites, New Groups

CCB MEDIA PHOTO Elaine Lipton of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival.

CCB MEDIA PHOTO
Elaine Lipton of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival.

EASTHAM –The Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival does not own a building. It owns three pianos. But for three weeks every summer for 36 years, the festival brings acclaimed musicians to the Cape for a series of often sold-out performances.

This year, the festival runs July 31 to August 28 at eight venues from Cotuit to Provincetown.

Elaine Lipton, executive director of the festival, said it all started 36 years ago when Sam Sanders, who founded the collaborative piano department at The Julliard School was visiting the Cape and “decided this would be a terrific place for a chamber music festival.” Sanders died in 1999.

The festival had somewhat informal beginnings.

“He started organizing in New York some of his friends from Julliard. He would throw everybody in a vehicle and drive them up here. They would do a couple of concerts which they would repeat two or three times in different places on the Cape. And eventually that grew into what we have today,” Lipton said.

Lipton said she first started coming as an audience member. “My husband and I are both very interested in classical music and when we moved here, the festival gave us an opportunity to hear some great classical music,” she said.

As the festival grew over the years, Lipton said it became more of a Cape Cod presence.

“We’ve been able to do some off-season things in schools. We have more of an educational outreach program that exists on the Cape and even though the musicians primarily come from off-Cape, we are really now a Cape Cod organization,” she said.

This year’s festival has a large number of major concerts, according to Lipton.

“It’s hard to actually tell you what the highlights are amongst 12 incredible concerts,” she said.

The show opens on July 31 in Wellfleet with a man Lipton called, “a young rising star” of a violinist, Yevginy Kutik with Spencer Myer on piano. The concert entitled, Rising Star, is at the First Congregational Church in Wellfleet on Friday, July 31, at 7:30 p.m.

“That should be a tremendously exciting opening concert,” Lipton said.

Other groups include the Emerson String Quartet is coming for the third year, “one of the premier quartets in the entire world”; the Boromei String Quartet, who although very busy, “still make time to come to the Cape for at least one concert”; and the Boston Trio, for the first time at the Cape Cod festival.

To listen to Elaine Lipton discuss the 36th Annual Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, listen below.

Comments

  1. greta berman says

    What a wonderful, refreshing, informative interview! Thank you very much!

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