Grateful for a very successful festival

On May 8, 2024 we wrapped up one of our most successful festivals, and we are still walking on air! To say that we fulfilled our mission would be putting it mildly.

Here are some statistics:

• We produced six evening concerts, six Pop Up Performances, and two Kids’ Concerts
• Evening concert attendance set a new record for the festival, with over 1,000 guests
• 46 Oregon Symphony musicians performed, and 22 friends
• Three of our evening venues were new to us
• The festival was three weeks long.

There were so many musical highlights it is impossible to spotlight only a few here. If you’d like to read some excellent coverage of our concerts, we encourage you to go to the Oregon ArtsWatch blog where the first four concerts were covered by James Bash here, and the final two were covered by Joe Cantrell here.

Everything we do goes toward making classical music approachable and accessible to our community—and our wonderful media sponsor, All Classical Radio shares these same goals! Their support enabled us to spread the word about our festival through their website and on-air—an invaluable gift. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout out to the jewel in our crown, All Classical’s host, and our super-duper emcee Christa Wessel. Thank you Christa!

We’d also like to thank our community partners, without whom we wouldn’t have venues: First Immanuel Lutheran Church; Hillsdale Community Church, United Church of Christ; The Old Madeleine Church; Moreland Presbyterian Church; Red Sea Community Church; and St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church.

So, what’s next for Classical Up Close? Early in June the organizing committee will meet to review the 2024 festival (did you fill out our questionnaire? There’s still time — click here — we really do read every single one), and begin planning for 2025! Part of that process, of course, includes budgeting. Might you consider donating today to help us figure out what we can and can’t do next year? We’d be so grateful if you did.

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What is Classical Up Close? 

About this video:

"Mary Weisensee (Creative Services Manager at Tualatin Valley Community Television) contacted Classical Up Close in November 2018, and we expressed our interest in doing something with them. She facilitated a meeting with Thaddeus Girard, MACC Administrator and Kevin Howard, production manager, and we talked about Classical Up Close and what kind of production we could do together. Kevin has been the point person ever since. He’s wonderful to work with!"  said Nancy Ives, Classical Up Close co-founder and Oregon Symphony principal cello.

We are very grateful to Kevin for his hard work and the beautiful production of this video spotlight on our mission and music. It is currently playing on TVCT, but you can watch it anytime here. We hope you enjoy it!

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