By James Nelson

With the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival now underway, there’s been a surge of activity on the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate. The students are here and making great use of Infinity Bistro, the Country Store, the Pub and the Hub. Audiences are coming for our series of concerts, lectures and master classes, and patronizing the restaurants.

We want to express our appreciation to the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Trust for their outstanding work over the winter months restoring the Grey Cottages along Mountain Road, and repainting Battell House. All of the Grey Cottages (they’re more of a blue grey now, each with a different color front door) are now completely renovated inside and out, providing first-class accommodations to the world-renowned faculty artists who come to Norfolk each summer.

We hope you’ve had a chance to meet Byron Kim and Lisa Sigal, the new directors of the Yale Summer School of Art program, who, along with the Norfolk Foundation, have been so active in introducing their lecture series to kick off the summer in Norfolk. 

We thought it might be interesting for you to know how the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival works, and what some of the pieces of this marvelous puzzle are.

The festival presents about 55 pubic events each summer, and this year we will perform 148 different works, 11 of them world premieres. 

Over the course of the summer we will have in residence 76 fellows, from 15 home countries, and 17 schools and conservatories. They will spend many hours preparing for the concerts in the Music Shed, as well as their daily coaching sessions with the faculty artists. If you look at their scheduled rehearsals and coaching sessions, along with the performances, it adds up to 396 “services” over a nine-week period, not including individual or ensemble practice time. This is a demanding schedule, but it’s what makes the Norfolk program work.

Before your eyes glaze over, here are some other numbers: we need to move and maintain 17 pianos, 18 studios, 19 residences and two performance spaces. We will have nine “man-days” of serious piano work before the start and then have about 65 other piano tunings during the summer. The Music Shed stage piano will be tuned 34 times.

And just as important, if not more so, is the dining hall, whose one chef with five helpers will prepare 9,964 meals over the course of the festival. And every single one of those meals is simply outstanding!

Here to make all this work is an administrative staff of three year-round administrators, five summer-season staffers, a kitchen staff of six, four piano tuners, a housekeeping staff of seven, a grounds crew of three and a new volunteer program that we hope to build into an important component of Norfolk life. 

We are grateful for the support of this wonderful town and the entire region. We work hard to provide programs that are interesting, engaging, entertaining and always impeccably performed. Last year we brought 7,791 people to our concerts and programs, and we expect that number to grow this summer. We enjoy being not only a part of the Yale School of Music but also a part of Norfolk. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you at the concerts this summer.

James Nelson is the general manager of the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, which runs this year from June 28 to August 17.