Garth Newel Benefit Concert Will Support Allegheny Mountain Radio

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

As CEO of Garth Newel Music Center, Steve Wogaman has spent years introducing other people. He welcomes the crowd, he makes the introductions, he makes everyone else comfortable. On Sunday, August 9, he will be the one at the piano.

Garth Newel will present “Celebrating a Gift of Music: Piano Dedication in Honor of Nancy Klein Maguire” at 4:00 p.m. in Herter Hall. It is a benefit concert for Allegheny Mountain Radio, a free-will offering, with every dollar coming to this station. It will also be Wogaman’s first public piano performance in Bath County.

How is he feeling about that? “Nervous as heck,” he said.

Steve has reason not to be. Wogaman holds a doctorate in piano performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with Menahem Pressler, the pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio and one of the most celebrated teachers in the world. But somewhere around age 40, he said, just as he was finally getting decent, he gave up on the idea of making a living at it. Playing became a labor of love. Until now, the only public playing he has done in Bath County has been the occasional turn at the organ at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

For the recital, he reached back into what he called the deep recesses of his brain. About two-thirds of the program is music he learned between the ages of 15 and 21.

The Piano

The concert exists because of a piano, and the piano exists at Garth Newel because of Nancy Klein Maguire.

Garth Newel gets offers of donated pianos from time to time, and Wogaman said those calls make him nervous, because you never know what you are going to find. This inquiry came in through Tracy Fisher, the husband of Garth Newel pianist Jeannette Fang. Fang was teaching at Duke University last semester, filling in for a sabbatical leave, so the two of them could never find a date to go look at the instrument together. Wogaman finally drove up alone.

He met Maguire, whom he described as an utterly charming person. 

“Imagine you go into a barn, somebody’s going to talk to you about a car, and you pull a canvas tarp off of a piano-shaped blob. And underneath it is a Ferrari with 100 miles on it that’s 25 years old.”

The instrument is a Steinway model B, the seven-foot piano and the second-largest Steinway builds. It was made in 1999. Maguire’s late husband was involved with a private equity firm that owned Steinway at the time, which gave the family what Wogaman called a most-favored-nation pathway to the purchase. They acquired it through Jordan Kitt’s, then the Steinway dealer in Washington. It is signed by Henry Steinway on the iron plate inside.

Today it is essentially showroom new. Maguire studied piano when she was young but never let the instrument get played much. The hammers show no wear. The action is perfect. It still has the stiff feel of a piano waiting to be broken in. The case is flawless.

Donating the piano would have been enough on its own. But Garth Newel wanted the gift to do more, and off the air Wogaman had been talking about what public radio has meant to him over the years. That is how a piano dedication became a benefit concert.

Why Radio

Wogaman grew up in Washington, D.C., listening to WETA. He pointed out something easy to forget now: back then there was no internet and no way to search for a piece of music you wanted to hear. You either went to the record store and bought it, or you turned on the radio and hoped.

“The fact that there was a station in that area that played the kind of music I wanted to hear was very special to me,” he said. “That had a big impact.”

Later in his career he began working with public radio from the other side, as the head of a neighboring arts organization partnering on underwriting and event promotion. He has a favorite story from those years. His trio, the Whitney Trio, once did an interview in Montrose, Colorado, on what he believes was a commercial top-40 station. The announcer came out of a song and said: that was Whitney Houston, and now we have the Whitney Trio.

He is more serious about what a station means in a place like this one.

“Allegheny Mountain Radio has been incredibly special to Garth Newel, and it’s time for us to be special to Allegheny Mountain Radio. These are remote places. And the world is a bigger place because Allegheny Mountain Radio is here.”

That support matters more this year than most. In 2025, a federal rescission bill stripped $360,000 in appropriated, congressionally approved funding from Allegheny Mountain Radio. The station has stayed on the air because of listeners, area businesses, and donors from around the country who decided it was worth keeping.

Another Side of Warm Springs Mountain

For anyone who has never made the trip, Wogaman offered a correction first: you don’t just walk in. You drive about a half mile up a driveway from Route 220 to get to the top of the hill. He has since put a sign at the bottom that reads “visitors welcome.”

The property was built in the 1920s by two artists, one of them the well-known William Sergeant Kendall. The riding arena they put up for their horses is now the concert hall, named Herter Hall for Christine Herter Kendall, whose maiden name it carries. Kendall died years before she did, and she stayed on as a widow for the rest of her life. Toward the end of it she met Luca and Arlene DiCecco and the three became close friends. The DiCeccos had already begun bringing young artists to the property for concerts, and when she died she left the estate and a small endowment to start a music center there.

Over the next 25 years the DiCeccos grew what Wogaman called an unbelievable unicorn of an arts organization, up the side of Warm Springs Mountain, built on a mission to share chamber music in a beautiful and remote place.

The Program

Wogaman did not hold anything back about what he is playing.

         Mozart: Sonata in B-flat, K. 570 (the second-to-last piano sonata Mozart wrote)

         Brahms: Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118 (written near the end of Brahms’s life)

         Chopin: Nocturne in D-flat major & Ballade No. 3

Playing all six Brahms pieces as a set is an emotional journey, Wogaman said, and it was a bucket-list item for him when he first finished learning them around age 21. Bringing them back into his fingers, he said, has been a privilege. Because that set ends a little darkly, he chose to close with the two pieces by Frédéric Chopin.

It is about 50 minutes of music, or roughly an hour with talking.

Event Details:

Our full interview can be heard below:

Allegheny Mountain Radio will share the YouTube link in the days leading up to the concert.

For Allegheny Mountain Radio, I’m Danny Cardwell.