“The Castleton Festival, which the conductor Lorin Maazel founded on his private estate in Virginia in 2009 and nurtured until his death in 2014, announced today that it will cancel its summer season in 2016 and take a year-long hiatus,” writes Anne Midgette in Wednesday’s (1/20) Washington Post. “ ‘I have no finances anymore,’ said Dietlinde Maazel, the actress and widow of the conductor, who took over the festival after her husband’s death and guided it through [the] 2015 season…. But the success of the season … exhausted the resources of the board and a staff that was too small to keep the necessary fund-raising activities going when the festival was over…. The cushion that had previously supported the festival through lean times, the income from Maazel’s conducting, is no longer available…. Getting resources and audiences out to the 600-acre estate [in Rappahannock County] has always been a challenge…. Maazel had always wanted the festival to achieve autonomy as a nonprofit organization independent of his own resources but died before he could oversee that transition himself.” Dietlinde Maazel says she hopes the year off “will allow her to reestablish the festival’s financial footing and continue its activities.”
Posted January 21, 2016
