Lorin Maazel

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Theatre House

Highlights from the inaugural Castleton Festival held on Maestro Maazel's farm

This summer, Maestro Maazel, Founder and Artistic Director of the Châteauville Foundation, opened his home for the first Castleton Festival. Throughout the six week period on Maestro Maazel’s farm in Castleton, Virginia, nearly 200 young artists gathered from across the globe to interact across a range of disciplines, with mentoring and performance activities at the highest level.

Highlights from the Festival include:

• A new production of Britten’s The Turn of The Screw, conducted by Maestro Maazel and featuring the work of Resident Stage Director William Kerley
• Successful revivals of Castleton Residency productions of The Rape of Lucretia, The Beggar’s Opera, and Albert Herring, with nearly all cast members returning to create performances as powerful and exciting as the premieres
• The creation of the new Festival Tent, seating 250 and selling out audiences to both Festival Orchestra concerts
• The very fist Lorin Maazel Master Class program, bringing together ten conducting apprentices who spent extensive time studying with Maestro Maazel, the output a free concert open to the public where each apprentice took the podium conducting the Festival Orchestra
• Welcoming young artists from the Royal College of Music, London and the Qatar Philharmonic, Doha to play in the pit for the operas
• Two recitals at the Theatre in Little Washington featuring principal players from the New York Philharmonic, Phil Myers, horn, with Liang Wang, oboe, and Robert Langevin, flute
• Glenn Dicterow, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic mentoring young string players in private coachings and performing Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1
• The engaging and talented Han-Na Chang, cello, joining the Festival Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme
• From Korea, the fifteen year old pianist Seonjin Cho playing the Piano Concerto composed by Edvard Grieg
• Solo, cabaret style performances by Castleton artists in the casual, outdoor setting of the Festival Café

In addition to these extraordinary artistic achievements, the Castleton Festival was also featured in over thirty different newspapers, magazines, and radio outlets. Several stories are highlighted below:

·        NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106203988

·        New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/arts/music/14beggar.html

·        The Washington Times: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/03/castleton-focus-on-rising-stars/

·        The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/12/AR2009071201980.html

The response from the participants, audience, press, and community has been overwhelmingly positive, as Maestro Maazel noted during an announcement after the July 12 performance of The Beggar’s Opera, “We are astonished that the houses have been packed all the way through the festival and we look towards the future with confidence knowing that there are people out there who appreciate what we’re doing and that love us and as much as we love them.” At the same time, Maestro Maazel announced that the Castleton Festival will return in July of 2010, featuring two new chamber opera productions as well as a revival of one of the productions that was presented this year.

For more information about the Châteauville Foundation or the Castleton Festival, please visit http://chateauville.org/.