August, 2020
While we cannot be with you in person this year, we are happy to share memories, pictures, and recordings of past seasons with you to create a Virtual MSCM. It’s been bittersweet to select and curate this collection. Looking and listening through it all fills us with happy memories and sense impressions of MSCM summers– and makes us all the more aware of the MSCM sized hole we’re facing this August.
We hope that watching the slideshow and listening to recordings from Barn concerts past will bring you a taste of the MSCM experience from the audience standpoint. To give you a little taste of the MSCM experience from our standpoint, we’ve collected a few personal snapshots that remind us of some of what makes up a perfect MSCM summer.
But first, a bit of the backstory on how we got here. We met at New England Conservatory Preparatory School when we were about twelve years old and we would never have guessed we would grow to become such close friends and create a music festival together! Throughout high school and college, we were lucky enough to spend numerous summers together at various music festivals enjoying the magic of sharing music between friends, beautiful surroundings and warm community. In 2009, two years out of grad school, we found ourselves musing about ways to recreate those idyllic summers. The two of us already found ourselves gravitated to Singing Beach in August, so it only seemed natural to gather some of our friends together for a week of chamber music in Sage’s hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea. The result was the first year of Manchester Summer Chamber Music. Five years later, our festival had exponentially grown– in fact, we had outgrown the venues in Manchester. Serendipitously, we were introduced to Chris Crockett who introduced us to the Barn at Castle Hill and has, along with the rest of our board, shepherded MSCM through these past six years. We are so grateful to Chris and the whole board for their unwavering support, as well as to our supporters, hosts, musicians, and of course our audience. MSCM wouldn’t exist without all of you and we can’t wait to share the whole, in-person, experience once again next year.
Warmly,
Sage and Lorna
