Salome Chamber Orchestra Hits the Hamptons
The Salome Music Festival, featuring the Salome Chamber Orchestra, is hitting to the Hamptons on August 24. The Chamber Orchestra was founded three years ago in Manhattan by siblings Lauren, Sean and David Aaron Carpenter. The Music Festival will feature many talented musicians from the orchestra, who hail from top universities such as the Curtis Institute, Julliard, Princeton and Yale, as well as some guest musicians, including Grammy Award-winning singer and composer Rufus Wainwright.
The Salome Chamber Orchestra serves to explore the role and relevancy of classical music in today’s younger generations, and in doing so, also helps to advance the works of underappreciated and well-recognized chamber composers. David Aaron Carpenter says, “I’ve played with many world-leading orchestras, but Salome offers something different – it’s versatile, it’s incredibly open to trying new things, and it’s made up of players who are of a generation who know that for classical music to survive, we have to push the boundaries.” Other musicians who have participated in events by the Chamber Orchestra are Alan Gilbert, Christoph Eschenbach, Natasha Bedingfield, John Legend, Michelle Williams and Sharon Isbin, among others.
The Chamber Orchestra has performed at many impressive locations in New York, from Carnegie Hall to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, through the Music Festival, the orchestra will play at many different venues throughout the Hamptons too. The festival will kick off with an opening gala on August 26, which is being hosted by a committee including Academy-Award winning actress Melissa Leo, philanthropist Lauren Bush Lauren and author Steven Gaines. Music at the gala will range from a pairing of Vivaldi’s and Pizzola’s famous workings of The Four Seasons with Berlioz’s Les Nuit d’été to songs by Rufus Wainwright.
David Aaron Carpenter will also be playing with the orchestra on August 31 at the Southampton Cultural Center. The performance will include movements from Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, among others. There will also be a free Music Under the Stars concert at Agawam Park, where award-winning soprano Amanda Bollag will join the performers in a few Broadway favorites and opera arias. Other shows will be at Nova’s Ark Project for the Terra Nova Foundation, the Jewish Center of the Hamptons and the South Fork Natural History Museum.
One of the main goals of the Salome Chamber Orchestra is to help those in need through charity concerts, such as the Clarins Million Meals Concert for the FEED Foundation at Lincoln Center in May, which raised money for over one million school meals. This year’s music festival gala will donate money to the Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention services for LGBT teens. According to Sean Carpenter, the Trevor Project, “shines a light on a strata of society that is often ignored, or itself feels unheeded.” He hopes that they will be able to help in this effort through the funds raised at the gala, andalso through the music. He and his siblings want to help “people in desperate straits and show them that music is for them, too.”
Helping out charity organizations like the FEED Foundation and the Trevor Project are not the Salome Chamber Orchestra’s only goals. The Carpenter siblings also highlight the importance of the Music Festival in re-introducing classical music to today’s society. “Classical music is part of life,” Lauren Carpenter says, “And we enjoy moving it from the traditional concert hall and into other places for all to enjoy.” The Music Festival will run until September 3, with concerts at many different locations. “We want to bring music to the masses,” Lauren Carpenter says.
Visit www.salomechamber.org, for tickets, performance schedules and more information.