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Magnolia Baroque Festival Receives American Masterpieces NEA Grant
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (November 30, 2009) – The Magnolia Baroque Festival will present three lecture-concerts highlighting six string quartets composed by Johann Peter, who wrote the first chamber music in America in the late 1700s while living in the Moravian community of Salem, North Carolina (now historic Old Salem). The $15,000 grant will enable Magnolia Baroque Festival, the only major early music festival in the Southeast, to feature the Peter concerts during its 2010 festival, June 16 – 20, 2010. These lecture-concerts are made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.
American Masterpiece Grants for Chamber Music celebrate the extraordinary and rich evolution of chamber music in the United States. They support programs that through performances and related educational activities, allow Americans in communities across the nation to experience American chamber music of the highest quality.
“We are extremely delighted with this grant,” said Glenn Siebert, founder and director of the Magnolia Baroque Festival. “Johann Peter is a significant American composer, who is not well-known by many Americans. Performing Peter’s pieces with expert early music musicians will give audiences a chance to experience his exceptional talent in a way that has not been heard before. It is an opportunity to make the public aware of his importance to classical music in early America.”
In addition to the three Peter concerts, a live radio broadcast of Peter’s work is planned, along with an exhibit of original Peter scores from the Moravian Music Archives in Winston-Salem.
The Magnolia Baroque Festival is a program of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, which has fostered the Festival for three seasons to date. “Our fourth season will have a very special dimension with the educational offerings made possible by the NEA American Masterpieces grant,” said Margaret S. Mertz, executive director of the Kenan Institute. “The grant is a real testament to the outstanding artistic quality of every single season of Magnolia Baroque Festival; we are thrilled and proud to have achieved such an endorsement from the NEA.”
The Magnolia Baroque Festival is a weeklong event that offers a transcendent experience of beloved Baroque masterpieces played on original period instruments in the spirit in which they were originally performed. The 2010 Festival will be held from June 16 through 20. Concerts will be held in Winston-Salem at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), Old Salem Museums & Gardens, and Calvary Moravian Church. More information can be found at the Festival’s website, http://www.magnoliabaroque.com.
The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts (www.kenanarts.org) is a privately funded program of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts that incubates projects that sustain artists at every point in their creative development through strategic partnerships that capitalize on visionary thinking in the arts.
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts (http://www.uncsa.edu) is the University of North Carolina’s conservatory for the arts, dedicated entirely to the professional training of students possessing exceptional talents in the performing, visual and moving image arts. UNCSA offers students focused, intense, professional training at the high school, baccalaureate, and masters levels in its schools of Dance, Design and Production, Drama, Filmmaking and Music.
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