Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, hosted in Norfolk, Connecticut, is believed to be the oldest active summer music festival in North America. Set among the Litchfield Hills of the lower Berkshires, the Festival traces its roots to the Battell family who started hosting summer concerts on the Norfolk town green in the 1880s. Now under the auspices of the Yale University School of Music, the Festival hosts more than 30 concerts each summer featuring professional performers and graduate music students from around the globe. Among many others, guest performers and composers over the years have included the Tokyo String Quartet, Percy Grainger, Fritz Kreisler, Midori, Pinchas Zukerman, Dave Brubeck, Jean Sibelius and Sergei Rachmaninoff. The Norfolk Festival has played an elemental role in the cultivation and development of classical music in America. Today, with its history and setting, it continues to provide the New England experience with an offering of chamber music.

Robbins Battell (1819–1895), the seventh son of a wealthy Norfolk, CT family, was a generous patron of music as well as a skilled amateur flutist and composer. After graduating from Yale University in 1839, he returned to Norfolk to manage the family business enterprises. This reached New York City and beyond and generated a vast wealth that allowed him to become an important philanthropist. Passionate about the musical life of the community, he created a singing school and conducted concerts of the Litchfield County Musical Association in Norfolk and neighboring Winsted. He conducted a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus to celebrate the centennial of the county in 1851. As a composer, he wrote hymns and choral arrangements, and set a great deal of poetry to music. Robbins was also concerned about the economy of his home town. To attract visitors and tourists, he built a hotel and, beginning in the 1880s, financed a week-long series of concerts on the green. This concert series became what is now known as the Norfolk Festival.

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