HOT SPRINGS — Some 250 international musicians will descend upon Hot Springs in a couple of weeks for the 2011 Hot Springs Music Festival, which will kick off its 16th season on Sunday, June 5.
Along with the group of musicians — which includes mentors, apprentices, associates and festival chorus members — this year’s festival will welcome a new music adviser, Peter Bay of Austin, Texas.
“Peter brings both a wealth of experience and also a freshness in the way he looks at music,” said Laura Rosenberg, the festival’s general director. “He’s very good at thinking about connections between pieces of music that will help audiences and musicians to encounter them in a new way. ... He’s a genius at programming things so that people can listen to them with fresh ears.”
Bay, a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of the University of Maryland and the Peabody Institute, has served as music director and conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra since 1998. He is also music director of the Britt Festival Orchestra in Jacksonville, Ore.
Bay was a guest conductor at the Hot Springs Music Festival in 2004, and he has served on the festival’s advisory board since 2005. He accepted the music-adviser position in September.
“I’m very thrilled and very honored, and I’m grateful to Laura for her considering me in the first place,” Bay said.
After accepting the position, Bay began working with Rosenberg to plan the 2011 festival, which will celebrate conductors who are also great pianists, in honor of the renowned conductor and pianist Franz Liszt.
“He was one of the greatest virtuoso pianists and composers of the Romantic era,” Bay said. “I thought we should put a particular emphasis on composers who are themselves great pianists, and that’s why we have two pieces of Liszt on the orchestral programs.”
The programs will also include pieces by Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven and the lesser known Hermann Goetz.
“One of our piano mentors, Michael Gurt, suggested this piece,” Bay said of the Goetz piece. “For whatever reason, people don’t play this work, but it’s a very beautiful piece from the Romantic era, and I’m just happy to have that sort of unusual piece on the repertoire.”
The schedule of this year’s events will follow a similar format to that of previous years with four orchestra concerts — three of which Bay will conduct — as well as Piano-Mania!, various chamber music concerts, a family concert and performances at the Historic Downtown Farmers Market.
Returning this year will be the Early New Orleans Dance Music concert, which Rosenberg said is “really fun.”
“That was a pilot project we did last year, and it was so successful that we’re continuing it,” she added.
The performance was led by mentor faculty member Todd Cranson, who not only conducted the concert but also researched all its music from a music archive in New Orleans, La.
“He brought back 1,400 pieces of music from the Robichaux Collection, so each season of the Early New Orleans Dance Music will be totally different repertoire, but all from this incredible collection and archive,” Rosenberg said.
The festival will also include an opening-night performance by the Avalon String Quartet, a new mentor ensemble in residence, whose members will also act as individual mentors at the festival, Rosenberg said.
Central to the annual festival is its mentorship program, which pairs world-class mentor musicians from major orchestras, chamber ensembles and conservatory faculties with pre-professional apprentices, who receive full scholarship plus housing. The two groups play side by side throughout the festival.
“One of the great things about running an apprenticeship program, where we mentor these young musicians just at the cusp of their professional careers, is that they then spread out to communities all over the world … and bring bits of what they have learned and spread the reputation of the Hot Springs Music Festival in all these communities,” Rosenberg said.
The majority of the concerts are held in the Hot Springs Fieldhouse, with the remaining concerts at churches and other locations throughout downtown.
In addition to the performances, all rehearsals are open to the public — something Rosenberg said is both “philosophically” and “operationally” important to the festival.
“A lot of people don’t have concert-going as part of their heritage, so it often has a degree of intimidation,” she explained, “and we found that when people come and see what a degree of struggle and work and creativity goes into building the music, ... it gives them both a point of contact with the music and a feeling that these musicians are real people with the same kind of struggles that you go through in any work field, and it feels less intimidating and much more fun.”
She added that open rehearsals are also a great way to introduce children to music.
“If you can only come for 20 minutes, if the kids are young and that’s their attention span, you can bring them for 20 minutes,” she said.
This will be Rosenberg’s last year with the festival, which she began with her now ex-husband, Richard Rosenberg, in 1996.
Following this year’s festival, Rosenberg will return to the San Francisco Bay area, where she grew up.
“I certainly look on this being my last season with a great deal of pride and certainly a degree of sadness,” she said, likening herself to a mother watching her child grow up.
“I’ve been with this festival since before the beginning,” she said. “I designed a lot of it, ... and again, as with parenting, you kind of adapt things over the years for what the child needs, and it’s been wonderful and very satisfying to do that. But what makes me happier than anything else is to know that this child will survive.”
Rosenberg said she is not concerned about the future of the festival, noting the strength of the board and the organization, as well as the support of the community and the musicians.
A new general director for the festival has been selected, and Rosenberg anticipates that the director will be announced prior to the start of this year’s festival.
The 16th annual festival will run from Sunday, June 5, through Saturday, June 18. For more information, including a schedule of events and program notes, visit www.hotmusic.org.