History
The Woodstock Mozart Festival had its origins in the 1987 as part of a summer festival at the Woodstock Opera House entitled "Woodfest". Additional performances were scheduled for the following year, and the 3 week festival has continued to be held annually. Internationally recognized guest artists have been a mainstay of the festival since the beginning.
The festival's original conductor/artistic director was Charles Bornstein. Since 1983, guest conductors have been an integral part of the festival format. Performances have also included a chamber music series and concerts in the Woodstock square gazebo (as part of the City of Woodstock's concert in the parks series).
John von Rhein, classical music critic for the Chicago Tribune, writes "The Woodstock Mozart Festival has long been a means for local classical buffs to catch rising young musicians and established artists who seldom get to crack the sacred precincts of downtown Chicago."
In 1995, the Festival Orchestra was named "Chamber Orchestra of the Year" by the Illinois Council of Orchestras.
Read more about this topic: Woodstock Mozart Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)