Back to (live) business at Caramoor BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
While other cultural organizations struggled financially during the pandemic, Caramoor in Katonah has thrived.
“I would say due to our Inspire, a Campaign for Caramoor, we have found ourselves in a strong position,” says Edward J. Lewis III, who was appointed president and CEO of the arts center on May 1. As a result of the eight-year campaign — which raised $41 million, mainly through individual donations but also through corporate, foundation and government funding — Caramoor has been able to keep all of its 30 employees on staff, quadruple its endowment and make major improvements to the 80-acre campus, like the new bandshell in Friends Field. (The center has an operating budget of $7 million.) “This year we exceeded our figures for the first day of our members’ summer presale with a 44% increase over 2020 and a 110% increase over 2019,” Lewis adds. “That’s excellent news and it tells us that audiences are ready to come back as well as just how much they value their Caramoor experience.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL (SORT OF)
Last year, Caramoor offered a pandemic bright spot with its streamlined, digital summer season. This year, the seven-week festival (through Aug. 8) has a full complement of 35 live performances. But there is limited seating in the Venetian Theater and Friends Field, although that could expand, Lewis says, with revised state guidelines. In reality, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts has been no stranger to change since
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its beginnings in 1946 with three concerts in the Music Room of the Mediterranean-style summer home of banker-lawyer Walter Tower Rosen and his wife, the former Lucie Bigelow Dodge, who played the theremin, an electronic instrument. (Their home is now the center’s house museum.) Over the years as the concerts expanded and the festival grew in reputation, it has shifted from mainly European classical music to modern, American music with an American Roots Festival, a Jazz Festival, a Pops & Patriots concert for Fourth of July (minus the fireworks this year) and a 91st birthday salute to Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, also postponed from last year. “We still have a nod to European classical traditions,” Lewis says, referring to appearances by Chanticleer, a male a cappella ensemble that performs everything from Renaissance music to jazz; the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; and various string quartets, including the Calisto Quartet, this season’s Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence. But increasingly Caramoor has embraced the new and experimental, as in the sound installations and sculpture that are vehicles for the public to explore its woods and gardens. In “The Forest,” Donald Nally considers the challenge of choral music in the time of Covid with a soundscape that visitors will follow at socially distanced intervals to hear singers placed 30 feet apart. John Luther Adams’ “Ten Thousand Birds” draws on different
