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THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2008
Special gift
In this trying year when our sons and daughters
are still in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan;
when gas is selling for $4 a gallon and the housing market has collapsed, Rappahannock County has received an unexpected and extraordinary gift: the Castleton Festival.
The festival is the creation of Lorin Maazel and his wife, German actress Dietlinde Turban. The Board of Supervisors approved the festival’s plans Monday in a meeting of such harmony that the supervisors seemed to wish it would go on forever.
The Castelton Festival is a program of opera and classical music that will be put on each summer beginning in July 2009 at the couple’s 550-acre Castleton Farm. There will be seats for some 200 guests in the renovated barn and the two-week session will have other events like seminars by classical conductors and musicians. The Maazels expect the festival will bring music lovers from Europe and Asia, New York and Washington as well as the towns of Virginia.
That’s the bare bones of it.
The real gift is that Lorin Maazel, perhaps the most famous conductor and musical director in the United States, has chosen to live in our county and to bring to it literally the world of music that he has experienced in his extraordinary career.
He is first and foremost the musical director and conductor of the New York Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. Earlier this year, he led the orchestra to North Korea for a concert that may go a long way to reducing the tensions with that cold and remote country.
In his career he has led orchestras across the world from Vienna to Pittsburgh. Now, as he and his wife have done on a smaller scale, he leads many of the people from that world of music to this quiet county. We are blessed. The Rappahannock News applauds the couple.
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