Portland Chamber Music Festival

Since 1994 the Portland Chamber Music Festival has been entertaining classical music lovers by bringing performers from all over the world to Maine for a series of summer concerts. The concert series, which is held in August each year, takes place in the beautiful new Hannaford Hall at the University of Southern Maine's Abromson Community Education Center in Portland.

Chamber music is classical music written for a small number of instruments. Originally, this meant the number of instruments that could easily fit into a private room, or "chamber" of a wealthy person's home or a royal person's palace. The most well-known variation of chamber music is the string quartet, especially the pieces written by classical composers Hayden and Mozart.

But chamber music has grown beyond these traditional boundaries, and the Portland Chamber Music Festival celebrates this growth. Wind instruments such as clarinets, oboes and bassoons have been featured in recent years, as well as harpsichords and pianos. Still, more traditional instruments such as violins, cellos and violas are at the heart of nearly all chamber music.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival is also committed to the development and performance of new music. While it may seem strange to think of "classical" and "new" at the same time, the festival's Resident Composers program ensures that new chamber music pieces are presented in Portland each summer. In fact, the Portland Chamber Music Festival received a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music recognizing its "contribution to furthering public interest and appreciation of contemporary American music."

In the interests of building a wider audience for chamber music, the Portland Chamber Music Festival has an aggressive outreach program aimed at young people. Tickets to concerts in the series are free to attendees under the age of 21. And the festival typically conducts a free children's concert on the festival's opening weekend.

Artists from countries around the world perform at the Portland Chamber Music Festival each year, no doubt for some of the same reasons so many tourists flock to Maine - the chance to experience summertime along the state's picturesque rocky coast.

The Portland Chamber Music Festival is one aspect of a flourishing arts scene in Maine's largest city. Portland also offers a widely-acclaimed art museum, and a local symphony The First Friday Arts Walk program of gallery open houses is well-attended even on snowy winter nights.

Tickets for the Portland Chamber Music Festival in the intimate, 500-seat Hannaford Hall can be purchased for each of the concerts in the series, or as a season-long subscription.