Garth Newel wraps up festival season Labor Day weekend

Warm Springs, Va. –

Garth Newel Music Center in Hot Springs finishes up its summer festival season this weekend with three days of events. The weekend kicks off at 6:30 Friday evening not with a concert, but with a presentation by author Peter Hatch. Chris Williams is the Executive Director of Garth Newel Music Center.

“We kind of shift gears, we throw a curveball at you,” says Williams. “We decided to feature Chef Josh Elliott and then we thought Well, it would be really nice to do a conversation or have an event or some activity.’ So Peter Hatch, who is recently retired from Monticello, he said he would be happy to come over and lead a discussion, a conversation about his work as kind of a horticultural historian, or the anthropologist/archeologist of Thomas Jefferson’s gardens and farms and estates. And his new book, which is called A Rich Spot of Earth is all about Jefferson’s gardening and his passion for variety in vegetable gardens, which I guess in Jefferson’s day was very unusual. We’re going to follow that with a wonderful dinner prepared by Josh Elliott featuring all locally sourced vegetables and meats.”

Concerts are featured on Saturday and Sunday at Garth Newel. Saturday’s concert begins at 5 and is followed by an optional dinner.

“Antonin Dvorak, he’s always a favorite with our listeners,” says Williams. “It’s wonderful romantic music with big sweeping sounds and big changes of color. So we have two of his large ensemble pieces, the Sextet which is a piece written for two violins, two violas and two cellos and then the Quintet in A major for two violins, viola, cello and piano. We’ll feature our quartet members, plus a number of different guest artists from around the country.”

Sunday’s concert is at 3, followed by an optional picnic, which is a tradition on the last weekend of the summer season.

“On Sunday it gets even bigger with Felix Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor for violin, cello, piano,” says Williams. “And then Mendelssohn’s giant Octet, which is an unusual piece, to have eight string players playing eight individual parts. That’s kind of a great way to finish the season, just to have this wall of sound.”

Teresa Ling, the violinist of the Garth Newel Piano Quartet, will be performing this weekend.

“Right now we are rehearsing, we are playing the archduke trio by Beethoven,” says Ling.

Music break

“But we’re very excited about our final weekend, which is going to feature the music of Dvorak and Mendelssohn,” says Ling. “We’re going to have a lot of interesting guest artists, Kelly Hall-Tompkins, Linda Bahn, Scott Rawls, Tom Kraines, Juliette Kang. They’re all coming in to play Mendelssohn’s famous Octet, which he wrote when he was only sixteen years old. It has all the energy and excitement of youth and yet is so mature as a composition, that it’s extraordinary that he was able to write that at such a young age.”

For ticket information for the Labor Day weekend events, contact Garth Newel Music Center at 540-839-5018. Or on the web, go to garthnewel.org.

Story By

Heather Niday

Heather is our Program Director and Traffic Manager. She started with Allegheny Mountain Radio as a volunteer deejay. She then joined the AMR staff in February of 2007. Heather grew up in the Richmond, Virginia, area and now lives in Arbovale, West Virginia with her husband Chuck. Heather is a wonderful flute player, and choir director for Arbovale UMC. You can hear Heather along with Chuck on Tuesday nights from 6 to 8pm as they host two hours of jazz on Something Different.

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