Newport Music Festival Presents Seventeen Outdoor Concerts This July

The Newport Music Festival has announced that it will present seventeen concerts this summer between July 4-20, 2021. All concerts will be held outdoors at historic mansions and venues in Newport, Rhode Island including The Breakers, Bellevue House, Castle Hill Inn, The Chanler at Cliff Walk, King Park, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center, Norman Bird Sanctuary, and Rough Point.

The concerts will have limited total capacity and appropriate social distancing between patrons; mask wearing will be required at all times and performances will be 60-75 minutes long without intermission.

This will be the first festival programmed by new Executive Director Gillian Friedman Fox, who came to Newport in January from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra where she was Director of Contemporary and SOLUNA Programs. Her genre-defying programming has received rave reviews for "bridging the gap between classical music and contemporary culture," according to Forbes, and "admirably erasing borders between artistic disciplines as well as between notions of high and low culture," as The Daily Beast noted.

In her programming for the 53rd season of the Newport Music Festival, Fox has renewed a commitment by the Festival to both preserving tradition and embracing artistic innovation. Repertoire this summer will include music by Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms alongside Jessie Montgomery, Joseph Bologne, and Teresa Carreño. Fox has also launched a new commissioning initiative - each year, the Festival will commission a new work by a Black, Indigenous, person of color, or woman composer as a commitment to the future of classical music. The first commissioned work will be premiered this summer.

Fox says, "We look forward to bringing to Newport a mix of Festival favorites and debuts this summer, both well-known names and rising stars. Our programming for 2021 represents a varied array of experiences and artistic interpretations as we set out to exceed expectations by being additive to the legacy of the festival: maintaining our commitment to exceptional acoustic music with historic Newport as the backdrop, while adding relevant touches from the 21st century."

Other highlights of the 2021 Newport Music Festival will include Opera Night at The Breakers and three free concerts presented throughout the Newport community.

Festival programming will be announced and tickets will go on sale to the public in April.

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