Wednesday (9/23) on her Washington Post blog Classical Beat, Anne Midgette writes, “Blanche Moyse is a quiet hero of the American music world. She was a co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. She established the New England Bach Festival, which offered tremendous performances of Bach’s masterpieces for 35 years. She created a vibrant musical community of both amateurs and professionals in rural Vermont. Today, she is turning 100. She should be celebrated more. … It’s all very well to catalogue the facts of Moyse’s life; but the best introduction to what she did were her Bach performances. Her choruses were made up of amateur singers; her orchestras, a pick-up band of professionals and semi-professionals; her soloists ran the gamut from young unknowns to Benita Valente and Arleen Auger. There was a touch of the homemade about the whole thing. Perhaps that was why it was able to take on a radiance, or grace, you seldom encounter in professional music: every word, every nuance came to quiet life.”
Posted September 25, 2009
