GUILFORD — Friends of Music at Guilford (FOMAG) recently announced the cancellation of its annual Labor Day Weekend Festival due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Traditionally, the two-concert event includes a Saturday evening organ program, and a Sunday afternoon lawn concert at the Organ Barn in Guilford, featuring the Guilford Festival Orchestra.
In making the announcement, FOMAG president Jenifer Ambler noted in a news release that this is the first time the event has been cancelled in its 55-year history.
“The organ program, being indoors, has always gone ahead, no matter the weather,” Ambler said, noting that “on a handful of occasions the orchestral program has been moved by rain to either Guilford Central School or Broad Brook Community Center.”
Began as inaugural recital for friends
The organ concert highlights Friends of Music's 1897 “tracker-action” pipe organ, which was installed in the barn in 1964 by late organist A. Graham Down, founder of the annual event.
Down, who had a summer home in the neighborhood, found the organ in disrepair in a Maine barn and had it moved to Guilford and fully renovated. On a rainy Labor Day Weekend in 1966, he invited a few friends and neighbors to an inaugural recital.
When Friends of Music at Guilford was incorporated in 1970 to continue the annual program, an outdoor program of orchestral, vocal, and, often, choral music was added.
Despite - or perhaps because of - its rural location, the organ concert typically draws a standing-room-only audience, and the outdoor concert has become an anticipated occasion, with patrons spreading picnic blankets under the trees on this 19th century farmstead.
“Not only does the festival draw many of the same audience members year after year, including folks who travel from throughout the region, but the festival is a sort of reunion for the musicians, as well,” Ambler said.
Orchestra players come from throughout the area, and from the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, and some players stay in cabins provided by the Kopkind summer residency program, which is also held on the site. After the final orchestra rehearsal, a lavish lunch for the musicians has become a tradition.
Over the decades, the organ program has featured many noted organists, in both solo works and pieces adding singers and other instrumentalists. The orchestral concert on the lawn has included symphonies by Mozart and Mendelssohn, works for chorus and orchestra, wind serenades, and, as with many FOMAG programs, premieres of new works by composers from the region.
FOMAG's festival has long shared the weekend with another annual event in town, the Guilford Fair, which has already announced cancellation for this year. Summer music festivals throughout the region have all been cancelled.
“We expect to return to the Labor Day Weekend Festival in 2021,” said Ambler. “We hope you'll join us then!”