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09/27/2017 08:30 AMWilliam Boughton’s vision for a performing arts festival like no other is about to come to life in Guilford.
The inaugural Guilford Performing Arts Festival (GPAF) launches Thursday, Oct. 12 through Sunday Oct. 15. It offers more than 50 free performances and workshops celebrating music, dance, theater, and literature. The program features world class artists, notable performers, and budding local talent. Several events invite audience participation. Venues include local schools, soaring sanctuary spaces, local businesses, the town’s library and community center, a ballroom dance studio, and a barn.
As founder of the festival, William and the all-volunteer GPAF board are extremely grateful for Guilford’s many commitments of community support, including a $20,000 grant from The Guilford Foundation. The generous grant is the foundation’s single largest annual grant, to date.
“It’s very much a community project. We have a wonderful team of volunteers who are helping to promote the festival and to build the organization [including] The Guilford Foundation, who have been partners in this venture from the outset and without whom we could never have embarked upon it,” says William.
The GPAF board also is grateful to 2017 local sponsors including Shoreline Theatrical Arts, Guilford Savings Bank, Page Hardware & Appliance Co. and Royal Printing Service.
William became a Guilford resident in 2007, upon beginning his tenure as the tenth music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO), founded in 1894. His career highlights include founding the internationally acclaimed English Symphony Orchestra (ESO) in 1980, producing recordings that gathered fans around the world. Among many other achievements, he successfully launched the first ESO Elgar Festival in Malvern and Worcester, England. William has guest conducted major orchestras (the San Francisco, London, and Helsinki Symphony Orchestras, to name a few) and has brought growth and recognition to NHSO, the country’s fourth oldest orchestra.
William founded NHSO’s Composer-in-Residence Program and premiered many of its works, knowing, as he says, “a composer is the life-blood of any musical performing group.”
Also under William’s direction, a recording of NHSO’s Walton’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony (Nimbus, 2010) was named a 2010 Critic’s Choice by Gramophone Magazine. In 2010 and again in 2014, under William’s direction, NHSO was awarded the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Award for Adventurous Programming.
“The orchestra is doing some really artistic things,” says William. “We’ve done recordings; we’ve toured throughout the state much more; we’ve developed the education program, broadened the reach of program, and increased the Pops programs as the Classics programs.”
William says he will step down from NHSO in 2019. In doing so, he will be able devote even more time and talent to building GPAF into a premiere event, tied to the town he has come to love.
“It’s part of a new chapter. I’ll be leaving the New Haven Symphony Orchestra as music director in June 2019, so I will have been with the orchestra 12 years,” says William.
William says Guilford inspired him, in many ways, to pursue establishing GPAF.
“Having lived here for 10 years, I was amazed at the talent that was available and living in the town—classical musicians; folk, jazz, and rock musicians,” says William. “It’s an extraordinary place, and there was no real collective output for these people; no umbrella under which they can come together.”
An amazing array of artists and offerings has come together for the first GPAF. Festival-goers can chart their own course through four days of offerings mapped out at guilfordperformingartsfest.org. Some events require advance registration for participation.
From Oct. 12 to 15, Guilford will be the epicenter of performance arts offerings such as Bach Around Town (First Church of Christ, Scientist), Music in the Marketplace: Witchcraft, an Autumn Cabaret (The Marketplace at Guilford Food Center), Vivid Ballet (Calvin Leete Elementary School), Write it Out: A Collaborative Songwriting Workshop (Guilford High School), Connecticut Coalition of Poets Laureate including open mic (Guilford Free Library), The Best of Rodgers and Hammerstein–Opera Theatre of Connecticut (First Church of Christ, Scientist), Another Octave–Connecticut Women’s Chorus (Christ Episcopal Church), Guilford Ramblers/Phil Rosenthal: Folk in the Barn (Bittersweet Barn), interactive Stepping Sounds (Guilford Free Library), and Sandy Connolly Presents The Rock Room with four live bands (Arthur Murray Dance Studio).
The festival also plays out many of its elements at Nathanael Greene Community Center, including performances by the George Manstan Big Band, Tuxedo Junction-The Sounds of Swing, four dance companies bringing a Festival of Dance, and even a community band workshop.
“I haven’t seen a festival that is as all-encompassing as this one,” says William, adding the scope is very much part of the plan. “In a town like Guilford, if you’re going to reach the majority of people in Guilford, you need to have a very broad reach. And it’s a way to reach out the community and to involve the community, and not just as an audience, but through workshops. If someone has guitar or trumpet they haven’t played since high school, and fancy getting it out again, then we’re providing workshops for those people.”
Believe it or not, William can imagine even greater things for the area. Given the shoreline’s active array of opera companies, chamber music, and other programs, “my long-term dream is to build an opera house—a place where you’ve got a pit and beautiful surrounds, and I think it needs to be somewhere in this locality,” says William. “I visited one in the U.K. this summer that had just been built, modeled on La Scala in Milan. I think it’s possible. That would be a great place for the community to go to.”
For now, bringing the performing arts into the lives of his shoreline neighbors with GPAF is a great start.
“The important thing with the arts is to be able to take time out of people’s busy lives to enjoy something that’s important, spiritually, to the soul. Whether its reading a book, dancing, playing music, it’s something that takes you out of your everyday life,” says William. “We tend to cram our lives so full with all of the things we have to do. Sometimes, the arts get pushed to one side.
“I can’t survive a day without playing the cello or piano, or studying a score or listening to music,” he continues. “I need that nourishment for my soul, on a daily basis, and I think it’s the job of artists to encourage people to take time to share in that.”
He thanks all the artists involved in the inaugural GPAF for embracing the opportunity to share their craft and for working to bring the community together.
“All of the artists are talking about it. It’s on their websites; they’ve been emailing people,” says William, adding, “It’s important we take the time out and come together as people. We measure everything in dollars and material things, but really life is a journey. It’s about the people that we come into contact with. It’s not about buildings and material possessions. It really is that journey of individual contact.”