JAMAICA-Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival (PFCM) is returning to celebrate the 2024 summer season with an admission-free public concert series running Tuesday, Aug. 6 through Sunday, Aug. 11.
It's a "little known gem of a chamber music festival [that] offers performances of both familiar and new compositions at the highest level," says Marlboro-based musician Jesse Lepkoff, whose chops span blues, bossa nova, and jazz to Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque.
"One can hear works by Mozart or Beethoven or by lesser-known composers, as well as contemporary new music with creative and innovative twists," he says.
Lepkoff's family and the family of PFCM founder and Executive Director Susanna Loewy "have been intertwined in Jamaica for three generations, and we're great friends," says Loewy, adding that "Jesse even made the cake for my wedding!"
She says that Lepkoff has been playing a Baroque concert at the festival for many years, "and it's always a hugely popular concert."
With bachelor's and master's degrees from Cleveland Institute of Music and a doctorate in music from Rutgers University, Loewy has built a career as a flutist, teaching at a handful of colleges.
She also teaches a studio of high school students who are "quite advanced, and I enjoy that," she says.
Loewy lives in Philadelphia, where she works as the executive director of the Network for New Music, which "commissions and performs new musical works by emerging and established artists of all identities" as part of its mission.
"I just started there. I'm also the flutist for that and that's been a great addition to both my administrative and my musical life. When I feel whole is when I'm able to have a hand in the organization and I feel like all of me is part of it, but I'm also getting to play."
She is also a freelance flutist and she plays with an ensemble in Washington, D.C.
If you build it - a website - they will come
Loewy spoke recently of the upcoming week-long festival and of its roots.
Her parents, Andy Loewy and Andrea Kapell Loewy, met in Jamaica where both families would spend the summers. "My dad's family still has his place on Pikes Falls Road and I spent every summer there as a kid," she says.
In 2011, Loewy recalls, "I felt like I needed more agency in my career; I wanted to feel more like I was creating something and sharing music with communities who were important to me."
She at up one night and thought, "I'm going to make a music festival, and it's going to be in Vermont."
Jamaica's recently renovated Town Hall was "clearly the place for the festival to be and within 48 hours I put together the website because I felt like if you make a website they will come: You know how people feel that it's real if it's on the internet?"
She put together concerts and sent out a fundraiser email.
"It all came together, and we've been doing it ever since," Loewy says, though "we had a lapse for Covid; thus, no festival in 2020 or 2021."
In 2022, Loewy was busy having a baby, so no festival then, either.
"Last year was the first year back in full force," says Loewy, who says that it's "wonderful to be up [here]" with her husband, Loren Goldman, and their two young sons.
'Riveting and beautiful'
In its short history, PFCM has performed 63 concerts in Southern Vermont, commissioned 13 world premieres.
It has shown 13 works of visual art, as well, in keeping with Lepkoff's description of PFCM's creative twists, like pairing music with works by his mother, world-renowned photographer Rebecca Lepkoff (1916–2014), a longtime Jamaica resident.
PFCM highlights musicians from the Grammy-nominated Inscape Chamber Orchestra in Washington, D.C., as well as musicians from in and around Vermont.
As is PFCM's tradition, a piece by the festival's composer-in-residence, this year Nathan Lincoln de Cusatis, will be performed at the concluding concert.
"So it started off as just all these people that I love to play music with," Loewy says. "I just wanted to be up in Vermont together playing music, because that's what it should all be about - and it still is that."
After the first year, PVCM started establishing ties with the Inscape Chamber Orchestra, based in Tacoma Park, Maryland.
Since then, "the Inscape Chamber Orchestra's ties to the Festival have gotten more intense and I'd say we're more than half Inscape [artists now]," Loewy says. "Our conductor and the resident composer are all from Inscape, too."
PFCM now operates as part of Inscape's nonprofit organization. "They're not getting a cut; they love being in Vermont, too," Loewy says, "so everything's tied together: It's all integral."
More practically, "everyone's paid," she adds. "Summer can be a hard time for musicians, so one thing I've been happy about is that we provide musicians a week of work in the summer."
This year, 13 musicians are involved in addition to Amphion, Lepkoff's four-person Baroque ensemble.
Of his fellow series musicians, Lepkoff adds, "they are topnotch."
"The performances are riveting and beautiful; you're hearing new pieces" with ground-breaking creativity, he says.
The festival's $25,000 budget - which comes from "a lot of grassroots funding and grants and some deeper pockets," Loewy says - makes it possible for all performances to be free.
"The whole idea was we didn't want to prohibit or make it hard for families to come," she says.
With two young children, "now I know I understand that ticket prices can make it difficult to bring a family somewhere," Loewy says. "I don't feel that tickets should be what funds the concerts - it's not a reasonable model. We should be raising the money elsewhere."
As of July 30, the festival has raised almost $22,000, according to its website.
The funding covers a bare-bones staff.
"I do all the artistic work, and we have a managing director, Andy Sabol, who helps with the day-to-day stuff at the festival because I learned at a certain point that I can't play well and run every detail," Loewy says.
Sabol "also makes sure through the year that we're on target with fundraising and organizational things," she says. Loewy and Sabol get assistance from a paid intern, Avery Amerine.
PFCM audiences, Loewy says, come from "all over southern Vermont. I think primarily Grafton, Jamaica, Townshend, some Stratton people, as well, and people from Brattleboro and Manchester."
The schedule
The festival week opens with a children's program Tuesday, Aug. 6 at 10 a.m., an introduction to instrument families by PFCM musicians and guest artists.
That evening, those same artists appear in a garden concert at 3417 Vermont Route 30, performing solos and duets. Informal and ambience rich, the event also features "food to share."
On Wednesday, Lepkoff's Amphion Baroque performs at Jamaica Town Hall in "Bigwigs of the Baroque" with Lepkoff on traverso and recorder; Emlyn Ngai, violin; Peter Sykes, harpsichord; Reinmar Seidler, cello, in works by late-16th-and-early-17th-century composers Rebel, Couperin, Rameau, Guillemain, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, and Vivaldi.
On Aug. 8 at the Grafton Church, PFCM musicians perform works by Arensky, Joachim, Ludwig, and Golijov. And at the closing concert on Aug. 10 in the Jamaica Town Hall, they'll offer works by Brahms, Wiancko, and Zwilich, as well as Lincoln De Cusatis's "Arboretum," commissioned by the Festival.
The composer will be present that evening for his world premiere.
Throughout the week, PFCM will also perform private concerts for southern Vermont assisted living facilities in Manchester and Townshend.
For more information about the Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival, visit pikesfallschambermusicfestival.com.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.