Basically Bach
Windham Festival Chamber Orchestra, Conducted by Robert Manno, Returns to Tannersville for a Thanksgiving Weekend Concert with Acclaimed Solo Pianist Simone Dinnerstein
By Sarah Beling
Pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco
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here’s nothing quite like a treasured tradition to kick off the holiday season—and local audiences are no doubt already looking forward to the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s annual Thanksgiving weekend concert with the Windham Festival Chamber Orchestra. This year’s evening-long program, Basically Bach, will feature the Orchestra along with acclaimed classical piano soloist Simone Dinnerstein at the Orpheum Performing Arts Center in Tannersville on November 25 at 7:30 pm. The Windham Festival Chamber Orchestra’s long-standing relationship with CMF goes back to co-founder, composer, and conductor Robert Manno’s first foray into the Catskill Region more than 40 years ago. “In 1981 my wife, violinist Magdalena Golczewski, and I found a house and property just above the town of Windham—this became a refuge from NYC and our grueling schedule at the Metropolitan Opera,” said Manno. “We knew by the beginning of the 1990s that we would make Windham our full-time residence after leaving the MET,” he added. Manno and Golczewski began looking for a local venue to perform chamber music, and by 1997, the first Windham Chamber Music Festival held a performance at the former Centre Church Building in the center of town. “We totally overlooked the fact that the overwhelming majority of local residents had never been 52 • issuu.com/catskillmtnregionguide
to a classical music concert and had never heard the term ‘chamber music,’” Manno told Chamber Music America of their first performance in the area. “However, remaining true to our individual tastes,” he added, “we presented a challenging program: the first performance of my 1995 String Sextet (a dark piece that has been likened by more than one reviewer to Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht) and Schubert’s great C Major Cello Quintet. This was definitely not an ‘easy listening’ concert, and yet not one of the 260 standing-room-only audience members left that night. That concert marked the beginning of a wonderful and exciting journey.” Over the last 26 years, the orchestra has frequently collaborated with CMF and added performances in Hunter at the Red Barn and the Doctorow Center, as well as in Tannersville at the Orpheum. This year’s Thanksgiving weekend concert—which will feature a series of pieces by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and of course, Johann Sebastian Bach—will be Dinnerstein’s introduction to Hunter and Tannersville audiences, an event that Manno said has long been in the works. “In mid-2005 we first heard and met Simone Dinnerstein perform the Goldberg Variations at a house concert in Columbia County,” said Manno. “Since our 2006 Windham schedule had already been
