For the first time in 31 years, a July in Palm Beach County passed without the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival.
Thrown off its tracks by adjustments for the COVID-19 pandemic and a drying up of donor funds, festival organizers called off the summer concert series they’ve been hosting since 1992.
But it’s too soon to write an epitaph for the festival, which gave four weekends of concerts for decades and issued six excellent recordings of the usually unusual music it presented. Organizers are promising to return in 2024 as they mount an online fundraising campaign for $25,000.
“We always knew that the way that we were doing things was not the normal way to do things, or that we always just literally flew by the seat of our pants for 30-plus years. It’s not like we didn’t know that,” said Karen Fuller, a flutist and one of the three founders of the festival along with clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert.
“But we just kept putting one foot in front of the other, and it just kept happening every year. Until, of course, who could have predicted COVID? We didn’t have any kind of plan in place for something like that. And we maybe made some decisions that looking back, we might have made other decisions,” she said.
For the first pandemic summer of 2020, the festival switched to video performances. Believing that audiences would not sit in front of their devices for long stretches of time, the musicians made short programs for which they charged a minimal fee.
“And that was a very, very expensive venture with which we got very little back, because that first summer there was so much great content (online). Everybody and their brother was uploading for free,” Fuller said.
Returning to live performances in the summer of 2021, festival programs were again cut back, and audiences were under pandemic restrictions.
“And then the next summer, we still were truncated. We couldn’t have full concerts. (Venues) wouldn’t let us go for more than like an hour; we could only have 50 people in the audience at a time,” Fuller said. “Those two summers just really did us in. It’s not something I think we predicted was going to happen.”
Last summer, the festival dwindled to one program featuring two large works by Beethoven and Joseph Rheinberger, played at three different venues in the south, north and central parts of the county. It was all they could afford, Ellert said at the time.
And this summer, no music at all.
“I found myself in the middle of June, all of a sudden, being very bored,” said Ellert, speaking with Fuller on a Zoom call last week. “And I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then I realized: I’ve been spending June preparing for July, and then August was recuperating from July.”
In its pre-pandemic days, the festival, which featured more than a dozen musicians who were part of the core group of performers, programmed four concerts each weekend in July. Each program was played three times, once in West Palm Beach, another in Palm Beach Gardens or North Palm Beach, and a third time in Delray Beach. Because the festival’s founders were woodwind players rather than string players, a good deal of the repertoire stayed away from chamber music staples such as string quartets in favor of less familiar but compelling repertoire by a host of fine composers.
Standouts over the years included large works such as Gounod’s Petite Symphonie, Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, and smaller pieces by Roussel, Poulenc, Surinach and the American composer Robert Muczynski. Contemporary composers including local residents Clare Shore, Clark McAlister and Marshall Turkin, as well as John Boda, Eric Ewazen and James Stephenson, were programmed.
The concerts were presented in a laid-back style with no printed program notes. Instead, one of the musicians came forward to talk briefly about the piece before it was performed. After the concert, audience members repaired to another room at the venue for cookies and punch, and conversation with the musicians.
Putting that together meant a lot of work, especially for musicians who had just finished a busy season of concerts playing for any number of musical groups in South and Southwest Florida.
“So we are season in May. And then it goes straight into cramming for July,” Fuller said. “So the end of May and all of June was all of our preparation for the festival, not just our personal planning and preparation, but all everything that went into setting the whole thing up. And then we do it for a month.
“And then, in the first two weeks of August, we all collapse. And then we start teaching. It was a bit of a grind for a lot of years. So a little bit more breathing room would be good, I think,” she said.
What a new festival would look like is in the works, and it depends on whether its fundraising goal can be met. But help has come from an unexpected source, a retired corporate communications executive named Tim Pagel who learned about the festival’s plight by chance.
“A few months ago I ran into Michael Forte, one of the Festival founders, at a spring training baseball game,” Pagel wrote in an email interview. “I asked about the status of the Festival and plans for summer 2023. That’s when I learned they were essentially running on fumes and seemed to be at a crossroads. To this fellow musician, it was like a gut punch.“
Pagel has been attending Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival concerts for 20-plus years, he wrote, and had been urged to help its organizers with marketing, but had not been able to do so with the pressures of his own career.
“Now, having been retired a few years, I have more time and energy to invest in this amazing team of chamber musicians,” he wrote.
Pagel wrote that the festival’s founders are “open to considering new approaches” for what the concert series should look like on its return.
“In the appeal letter we just sent out to prior attendees we’re soliciting suggestions on what they’d like to see from a new/revitalized Festival in 2024 and beyond,” he wrote. “It could be alliances or partnerships with other arts organizations. Maybe Art After Dark at the Norton or an onsite workshop at Dreyfoos or Bak.”
Pagel has just established a new GoFundMe page for the renewal of the festival and is confident the money can be raised.
“These are professional musicians at the top of their game focused on bringing timeless music to Palm Beach County audiences. Audience sizes should reflect that. I’ve always been frustrated that more people of all ages and backgrounds are not seeing these shows live and in person,” he wrote. “I often think this is the best professional musical ensemble nobody’s ever heard of … and right in our backyard. We need to change that.”
Fuller said the festival was invented as much for its musicians as its audiences.
“Part of our mission is to, not just to service the people in Palm Beach County, but also provide a service for local musicians that they can stay home in the summer, if they want to, if they don’t want to travel away. Maybe they have small kids, or got whatever reason they want to stay home, but they want to have work in the summer,” she said.
And not having that work in the summer of 2023 has been difficult.
Ellert said he talked recently with a festival regular who was playing at a different summer event in the Northeast, but missed being in Palm Beach County this July. “She’s told me since she got there that it’s not the same musical experience. And she really wants to get back here next year,” he said.
If you would like to donate to the PBCMF, you can do so by visiting www.pbcmf.org or its special GoFundMe page at www.gofundme.com/f/reinvigorate-palm-beach-chamber-music-festival.