This is the fourth season of the Chamber Arts Festival of Marbletown. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our Board of Directors, staff and volunteers—and to the support of all who are reading this—I can safely predict that we are here to stay.

     Our purpose is unchanged: to bring about intimate artistic encounters between performers and audience. One of the best ways to do this is to present chamber music of the highest quality, played by extraordinary musicians, in a relatively small space where this music can be heard to best advantage. Thanks to our luxuriously-broad definition of chamber music, we can span the centuries and styles from the14th-century Italian ballata to 21st-century percussion music for aluminum pipes and amplified cactus; from jazz vocals to the Archduke Trio. Diverse as they are, our concerts always have two things you can count on: intimacy and excellence.

     Memorable concerts are not all we do, although everything we do is closely related to them. Weeks before each Festival, I present a lecture/discussion series, free and open to the public; at each talk I (or a guest speaker) focus on one piece that is to be heard at the upcoming concerts, or one genre, or one composer. We also try to build the chamber music audience of the future through our partnership with the Rondout Valley Central School District. We bring Festival musicians into the schools for master classes and demonstrations; we also award up to two $1000 scholarships yearly to graduating seniors, recommended by the high school, who are about to pursue full-time music studies at conservatories or colleges.

David Alpher, Artistic Director