Events

Dear Friends, We hope this finds you and yours all well and enjoying the emerging spring here on the coast of Maine in these otherwise difficult times during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We recognise for everyone’s safety we will not be able to hold concerts and lectures in our hall this year but are presently hoping to re-open our doors in the summer of 2022.

For our new patrons and visitors to the area, the Innstitutes’ home base is the restored 1820’s timber framed barn on the 200 acre preserve at Oceanside Meadows Inn in Prospect Harbor, Maine. The Innstitute was established by Ben and Sonja Walter-Sundaram with the goal of supporting the arts and sciences, encouraging research and development, and offering opportunities for learning. Our daughter Kalyani (now 12), who loves reading, acting, dancing swimming and exploring nature with her big brother, Kieran (now 18) a budding scientist and artist, look forward to welcoming you to our 2020 summer season of virtual events.

An Archive of our 2019 Program Schedule Follows

In the summer of 2019 we were proud to present several concert programs of the Winter Harbor Music Festival in our Hall as well as many other science and art programs.

2019 EVENT: Saturday, May 4th, at 7:30 p.m. we have the great pleasure of hosting a Gouldsboro Historical Society program with the award winning author John G. Langley who will be presenting his new book “Canadian Confederate Cruiser. The Story of the Steamer Queen Victoria”. His new book covers the story behind Gouldsboro’s sometimes controversial custody of the bronze ship’s bell that has such a special significance both to Gouldsboro and to Canadians.

Mr. Langley will give a slide presentation and tell us about the original ship S.S. Queen Victoria, her fame in the forming of Canada’s constitution, then the rescue in 1866 of the crew of the sinking ship, when her beautiful bronze bell was gifted to a Gouldsboro sea-captain as thanks for the rescue. Soon given to the Town, the bell slept for a century as a school bell until the early 1960s when, as told in Mr. Langley’s book, it became identified as Canada’s “Liberty Bell” but also as a strong symbol of Gouldsboro’s proud maritime heritage.

The subsequent story of upholding the bell’s double identity has seen many developments, some very strong disagreements as well as much shared pride, all carefully chronicled by Mr. Langley from previous visits to Gouldsboro. He brings a unique Canadian perspective to the story, which as hosts we welcome, and hope his insights can be widely shared. Admission is free with all donations going to support the Gouldsboro Historical Society and their magnificent museum.

2019 EVENT: Thursday, June 27th, 7:30 p.m. Goldberg Variations performed by Deiran Manning Gouldsboro native Deiran Manning will perform the complete Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. Deiran has given performances across the United States, Ireland, England, France and Italy at notable venues such as Merkin Concert Hall, Weil Recital Hall at Carnegie, the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the New York City Mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion. Originally a Maine native, Deiran spent his formative years in New York City at LaGuardia High School, eventually earning his undergraduate and masters degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. His notable teachers include pianists Edmund Battersby, Edward Auer, Karen Shaw, Jeffrey Swann and baritone Wolfgang Brendel. As a singer, Deiran has performed with various companies including IU Opera Theater and WHMF Opera. He regularly works as a vocal coach in the New York area due to his experience as both a pianist and singer. Deiran has also worked at New York University an Adjunct Professor of Piano. Notable awards include; Stanza Governor’s Prize in Composition, LISSMA International Piano Competition, Children’s Foundation for the Arts, Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition and the Ira Gershwin award.  Tickets available here $10 in Advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.

Jeffrey Swann

2019 EVENT: Thursday July 11th, 7:30 p.m. Jeffrey Swann in Concert. Pianist Jeffrey Swann will perform a program featuring Schumann’s Davidsbündlertäzne and excerpts from Liszt’s Années the Pèlerinage as well as Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses. Swann enjoys an international performing career which has taken him throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia. He won first prize in the Dino Ciani Competition sponsored by La Scala in Milan, a gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and top honors at the Warsaw Chopin, Van Cliburn, Vianna da Motta and Montreal Competitions, as well as the Young Concert Artists auditions in New York City. His large and varied repertoire includes more than 60 concertos as well as solo works ranging from Bach to Boulez.

In addition to presenting lecture/recitals worldwide, Mr. Swann has performed with the symphonies of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Indiana, Dallas, Saint Louis, Phoenix, Houston, Lexington, Baltimore and Minneapolis; and in Europe with the orchestras of Rotterdam, The Hague, Belgian National and Radio, Santa Cecilia, La Scala, Maggio Fiorentino (Florence), RAI Turin and Rome, Südwest Rundfunk, Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Prague Philharmonic, Radio France de Montpellier, and the London Philharmonia, among many others. The conductors with whom he has performed include Zdenek Macal, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Marek Janowski, William Steinberg, Kazimirz Kord, Myung-Whun Chung, Roberto Abbado, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti and Leonard Slatkin. In addition, he continues to lecture regularly at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, and at Wagner Societies in the United States and Italy. Mr. Swann has also served as a judge at many competitions.

A native of Northern Arizona, Jeffrey Swann studied with Alexander Uninsky at Southern Methodist University and with Beveridge Webster and Adele Marcus at The Juilliard School, where he received his B.M., M.M. and D.M.A. Degrees. Mr. Swann can be heard on Ars Polona, Deutsche-Gramophon, RCA-Italy, Replica, Fonit-Cetra, Music & Arts, and Agorá recordings. His CD, “The Virtuoso Liszt” (Music & Arts) won the Liszt Society’s Grand Prix, and his first volume of the Complete Beethoven Sonatas (Agorá) was chosen one of the Best of the Year by Fanfare magazine. His most recent release features works for piano and orchestra by Chopin with the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano.

Jeffrey Swann has served as Artistic Director of both the Dino Ciani Festival & Academy in Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He is currently Professor of Piano at New York University and the President’s Distinguished Artist-in- Residence at Northern Arizona University. Tickets available here $10 in advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.

2019 EVENT: Thursday July 18th, 7:30 p.m.  A Story of Maine in 112 Objects with Bernard Fishman, Director of the Maine State Museum.  The Maine State museum is America’s oldest state museum (founded in 1836), and is known as ‘Maine’s Smithsonian’ because of the breadth and diversity of its collections—nearly a million objects representing almost everything about Maine and its cultural, environmental, and natural history. Its collections are the largest and most comprehensive of any museum in Maine. Bernard Fishman, the museum’s director, has recently edited and published a book, A Story of Maine in 112 Objects, which tells the whole story of Maine through a choice selection of 112 objects in the museum’s collections. From a 400 million year old fossil, through the only authentic Viking object found in the United States, to a genuine 200-year old sawmill moved to the museum and rebuilt piece by piece inside it, he’ll tell the fascinating stories of how the museum acquired some of its most compelling objects, and what they have to tell us about the saga of Maine. You won’t want to miss these tales of how you create a museum and its contents, how these special objects got to the museum, and what they and the characters that made or used them have added to the richness of our state.

Bernard Fishman grew up in New York City and trained as an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, after graduating from Columbia University. He worked in Egypt for three years, for the University of Chicago. His family owned several Five and Ten Cent Stores in Maine under the name of the M.H. Fishman Company, and he spent eleven years at summer camps in Maine during his early years. He directed history museums in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Rhode Island before coming to the Maine State Museum in 2012.  Admission is free with all donations going support the Maine State Museum. Seat reservations strongly recommended. Tel: (207) 963 5557

Laura Whittenberger2019 EVENT: Thursday July 25th, 7:30 p.m. Soprano Laura Whittenberger and pianist Sasha Beresovsky will perform a program of English language art song. Praised in the Baltimore Sun for her “impressive voice”, Laura Whittenberger is a versatile singer and theater performer. This season so far she’s appeared in Maine as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Annapolis in Kiss Me, Kate, and made her Long Island Opera debut as Pauline in La Vie Parisienne.Last season she appeared at Signature Theatre in A Little Night Music, and in NJ, PA and MD theaters inCamelot (Nimue), Sweeney Todd (Johanna), Hair, and The Pirates of Penzance (Mabel). Other credits include Olympia/Blue Lady in Pinocchio as a Young Artist with Cedar Rapids Opera (IA). In concert, Laura performed an NYC recital at the American Irish Historical Society, singing selections from Never Give All the Heart, a new collection of songs set to the poetry of W.B. Yeats. She recently finished recording a sequel to that album. A winner of the Montpelier Arts Center recital competition, she will be performing a series of French melodie recitals through 2018 with harpist Jacqueline Pollauf.

Highlights from recent seasons have included Beauty in Giannini’s Beauty and the Beast with Lyric Opera Baltimore, Rose in Ruddigore (ME), Johanna in Sweeney Todd (MD), Peggy in the premiere of Revolutionary Gentleman (DC), Meggie in the premiere of Catch a Dream (DC), Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins (TN), and Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance (MD). As Mabel she was nominated for Broadway World’s “Best Actress in a Musical” award for both the Baltimore and Philadelphia regions.

Sasha Beresovsky is a graduate of Indiana University, studying most recently with the late Edmund Battersby. In his quest for the ideal interpretation, Sasha looks to live recordings by artists such as Richter, Schnabel, Sofronitsky, and Cortot. He regularly appears at The Lyceum in Old Town Alexandria as part of the Summer Chamber Music Series of WMPA, last year performing Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Sasha was a participant in the 2015 Artur Balsam Ensemble Classes for Piano and Strings and the 2016 Winter Harbor Music Festival.  Tickets available here $10 in advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.

WHMF Gala Concert

2019 EVENT: Thursday, August 15th 7:30 p.m. WHMF Gala Concert Join us for our annual Winter Harbor Music Festival Gala Concert featuring flutists Carol Wincenc, Deirdre McArdle and Jeff Mitchell. They will be joined by pianists Deiran Manning, Sasha Beresovsky and Gena Raps alongside former New York Philharmonic Cellist Evangeline Benedetti. This is one of the culminating concerts of the Winter Harbor Music Festival and we guarantee it will be an evening not to be missed. Tickets available here $10 in advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.

2019 EVENT: Thursday, August 22nd 7:30 p.m.  Dr. Malcolm Shick will give a multimedia presentation centring around his new book Where Corals Lie: A Natural and Cultural History. For millennia, corals were a marine enigma—organisms that confounded scientific classification and occupied a space between the animal and plant kingdoms, and even had mineral properties. Our cultural relationships with corals have been similarly ambiguous. The danger posed by unseen underwater reefs led to an association of corals with death and interment that has figured in historical expeditionary accounts, literature, poetry, music, and film, while the bright redness of precious Mediterranean coral was associated in European and Indian mythology with its bloody origin. And yet, coral skeletons have long been prized as jewelry and ornament, featuring prominently in antique cabinets of curiosities, and also being used as amulets and medicine.

Seen as rainforests of the sea, coral reefs have become emblematic of the fragility of marine biodiversity, their declining health a warning sign of the human-driven climate change that has produced warming seas, ocean acidification, and rising sea levels. Looking at corals as builders of islands and protectors of coastlines, as building materials themselves, as well as at the myriad ways in which diverse corals have come to figure in art, medicine, folklore, geopolitics, and international trade.  Malcolm Shick will reveal how the threatening has become threatened—and recalls the danger this poses to humans. His book is exceptionally embellished with a wide range of biological illustrations, underwater photography, and fine art, many examples of which will be shown in this talk that opens the door onto these most peculiar of animals and explores the synergies among fine art, literature, history, music, mythology, and science, telling us “Where Corals Lie” in the human experience and imagination.  Admission is free with seat reservations strongly recommended. Tel: (207) 963 5557

Paul Sullivan2019 EVENT: Thursday, August 29th, 7:30 p.m. Pianist Paul Sullivan will be joined by Winter Harbor Music Festival Artistic Director Deirdre McArdle for a concert which will bridge the gap between classical music and jazz. Paul Sullivan has enjoyed a richly varied and distinguished career as a composer and a pianist. As a soloist, with his trio, and as a member of the Paul Winter Consort, he has played concert tours in most of the United States and Europe, as well as the Middle East, Central America, and Asia. He has performed among the dunes of the Negev Desert, in Leonard Bernstein’s living room, and on the stages of many of the world’s finest concert halls. He has been a guest on Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz”, and he has also performed with some legendary orchestras, such as the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, the Boston Pops under both Arthur Fiedler and Keith Lockhart, and several regional orchestras around the US.

Sullivan has worked in some of New York’s most prestigious jazz clubs as well, including Sweet Basil, The Village Vanguard, and Bradley’s. He has played with a wide variety of masters from Benny Goodman to Tommy Flanagan, as well as Red Mitchell, Lou Donaldson, George Mraz, Gerry Hemingway, Marc Helias, Gene Bertoncini, Eugene Friesen, Jamie Haddad, Luciana Sousa, Cafe, Sarah Lee Guthrie, Noel Stookey, Don McLean, Pheeroan AkLaff, Eddie Daniels, Richard Stoltzman, Nana Vasconcelos, Cyro Baptista, Ivan Lins, Glen Velez and many other luminaries. His 18 CDs have sold over 300 thousand copies and have won 3 Indie Awards. His music has been broadcast internationally, as well as on all the major American networks, including National Public Radio. He received a Grammy Award for his work on the Paul Winter Consort CD, Silver Solstice.

Founder of the Winter Harbor Music Festival, and daughter of Irish-American painter Patrick McArdle, Deirdre is the Executive Director of Harbor Music; The Artur Balsam Ensemble Classes for Piano and Strings, supported by Indiana University, the manager of the 92 Y Orchestra, artistic director of the Alexander & Buono International Flute Competition, and serves as a member of the executive board of the New York Flute Club. An avid chamber music player, she has had notable performances with members of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Deirdre has served on the faculties of Manhattan School of Music and Bowdoin College and performed to critical acclaim in solo recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall and the South Bank Centre in London. Recent performances include a tour of Taiwan and Japan with the Taipei Philharmonic and the Saga Harmonie, appearances in Israel, France and Ireland and concerts at the 92nd Street Y and the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City. Tickets available here $10 in advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.

Fred Greenhalgh2019 EVENT: Thursday, September 5th, 7:30 p.m. Solar in Maine – Our Future Run on Sunshine.  Solar has dropped in price by over 75% over the last 10 years, and converting just 1% of Maine’s land mass to solar panels would be enough to meet our energy needs forever. Though it may not feel like it in the middle of the winter, Maine actually gets lots of harvestable solar energy – thanks to our being at the same latitude as the French Riviera. Fred Greenhalgh – OMIAS alumnus, off-gridder, radio dramatist, and creative services director of ReVision Energy – will give a brief overview of New England’s solar potential, a discussion of current solar energy options for homes and institutions, the future — battery storage, beneficial electrification, and beyond — and how energy policy helps (or hurts) our transition to a solar-powered economy.  Admission is free with seat reservations strongly recommended. Tel: (207) 963 5557

David Bernat

2019 EVENT: Thursday, September 12th, 7:30 p.m. Violin and Piano Recital Winter Harbor Music Festival veteran Elias Dagher will be joined by violinist David Bernat for an evening of violin and piano music. Elias Dagher was born in Boston to a family of Lebanese immigrants. He now studies collaborative piano with Vivian Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory, where he works daily with many vocalists and instrumentalists. He received his Master’s degree in piano performance, also at NEC, in 2017 as a student Alexander Korsantia. Though the piano is central to his life, he also enjoys vegetables, dogs, and a sense of shifting spiritual studentship to various composers and poets; for now, he counts Chopin and Schubert among his greatest teachers.

David Bernat is currently in the masters program at Juilliard studying with Laurie Smukler and Joseph Lin, and is a recent graduate of The New England Conservatory where he was a student of Soovin Kim. Particularly drawn to playing chamber music and as a duo, David has performed throughout the United States, Europe, and China, and was recently featured on BBC and WQXR radio broadcasts, as well as at Tanglewood. Tickets available here $10 in advance $12 at the door. Seat Reservations strongly recommended.