Greetings and Happy New Year!
On behalf of all our Board, I want to wish you a safe, happy and prosperous 2021. We expect this year will see the return of Kelowna Chamber Music events at the RCA and we expect to be able to give you details of our 2021-22 season in a month or two. Just so you know in advance, however, we will not be sending out our next season subscription renewal offer in the mail until the timeline of the “return to normal” is clearer. We are following the current vaccine roll-out with bated breath.
While we have great faith in science and in our public health professionals, we face significant uncertainty about when a return to the theatre will be safe for our audiences, volunteers and artists.
While it is, frankly, frustrating not to have better information after these many months of dealing with the pandemic, we believe we should only promote subscription renewals when our level of confidence is much improved.
Personally, I find the limitations of COVID times are more supportable if I make plans for future musical treats. A favourite cultural destination of ours is Santa Fe, New Mexico, home of the Santa Fe Opera and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Santa Fe, if you don’t already know it, is a wonderful multi-season cultural destination and offers more art galleries than any other city in the US outside New York.
This year, the Opera season runs from July 10 to August 27 and productions include Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The SFO, now under the leadership of Artistic Director Alexander Neef, has a reputation of showcasing the best in young talent, on the stage and behind the scenes. The theatre, which is roofed but open on three sides, is a few minutes out of town and offers beautiful views of the Sangre de Christo mountains.
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, whose Artistic Director is American pianist and composer Marc Neikrug, takes place this year from July 18 to August 23, 2021. The performance venue is at the New Mexico Museum of Art which is located near the famous Plaza in the centre of town and not far from the Georgia O’Keefe Museum.
I have noticed that tickets for the SFO and the Chamber Music Festival are not being made available to the general public as of this writing; the organizations are probably waiting to see how public health measures evolve since, in a normal season, ticket sales would already be well underway. Of course, it may turn out that these kinds of travel plans are too optimistic for this summer but I am enjoying working on them and hoping a trip will be possible.
If you have a favourite musical destination, please let us know what it is by emailing [email protected] to let us know what you particularly enjoy about it. We will collect your recommendations and include them in future issues of this Newsletter.
Whatever your pandemic pastimes, we hope you are feeling optimistic about a future in which we can return to most of the entertainments and educational activities we enjoyed in the “before times.” And we hope that one of those will be CMK concerts at the RCA!
All best wishes,
Diane Bond
President, Chamber Music Kelowna Society 2020-2021