Printer Friendly Version - Ann Drinan: Taking Notes

The list of music series Ann Drinan directs is almost as expansive as her résumé as a violist. In addition to serving as managing director of the Chestnut Hill Concerts at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook and the managing director of the Orchestra of New England in New Haven, she is the new managing director of the Robbie Collomore Concert Series, which returns to Chester in September, October, and November.Photo by Rita Christopher/The Courier

If, as Shakespeare wrote, music is the food of love, Ann Drinan surely doesn’t have to worry about nourishment. Ann is the new managing director of the Robbie Collomore Concerts at the Chester Meeting House. For the past two years, the concerts have taken place on four Sundays in the autumn, rather than the previous pattern of two in the fall and two in the spring.

Ann is also the managing director of the Chestnut Hill Concerts, the summer series in August at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook, and the managing director of the Orchestra of New England, which starts its New Haven concert series at the end of November and goes through the winter.

When Ann is not managing concerts, she is playing in them. She has been a viola player with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra for 38 years.

This is the first season for Ann with the Collomore concerts, sponsored by the Chester Historical Society. It is the 45th year of the concert series itself, and since l993 Martin Nadel, the chair of the Concert Committee, has been the face of the series, familiar to audiences as he introduced each of the performances. But this year, Nadel, a retired physician, stepped down as chair (though he remains a member of the concert committee) and the group hired its first professional administrator.

“I just had my 83rd birthday and it gets harder to do everything,” Nadel says. “And I wanted a transition to new leadership to ensure the continuation of the series.”

“She has very deep insight because she is a professional musician herself,” Nadel explains. “And we all liked her. She’s a very nice person.”

Ann reciprocates with enthusiasm for the Collomore Committee—”Incredibly dedicated people,” she says.

As a musician and an administrator, Ann has always been involved with classical music, but the Collomore series has a different mix of artists. Two of the concerts present classical musicians and two showcase jazz, folk, or world music. On the classical side, the Sunday, Sept. 23 concert features a duo, violinist Stella Chen and pianist Tomer Gewirtzman, and the Sunday, Nov. 4 show features pianist Salome Jordania.

The contemporary performances include jazz vocalist, composer, and arranger René Marie on Sunday, Oct. 14, and Andes Manta, an Andean folk music group from Ecuador, on Sunday, Nov. 25. Each concert is followed by a reception catered by a local restaurant where the audience has a chance to talk with the performers.

Ann started on a violin and piano at the age of four with her aunt, a music teacher. The viola came in junior high school when the music teacher observed there were no viola players in the orchestra. Ann volunteered that she thought her family had a viola in her front hall closet and soon she was playing it.

In the 9th grade, she was accepted into the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra as a violist. Still, Ann’s career as a musician nearly ended between her freshman and sophomore years at the University of Wisconsin when she developed what she describes as a polio-like paralysis in her left wrist.

After six weeks, some but not all of the movement began to come back. Ultimately, she learned a new way to bow her instrument, one less dependent on wrist movement.

Unsure about the prospects of a professional musical career after college, Ann enrolled in Yale where she got a master’s degree in international relations. The subject is one that has a particular resonance for her family.

Ann is the niece of Father Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, who was also a Massachusetts congressman, and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Fr. Drinan was first person to introduce a resolution calling for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, though not for the Watergate scandal but rather for the bombing of Cambodia

International relations, nonetheless, didn’t figure in Ann’s subsequent career, though Yale did. Through her contacts at the university, Ann got a position as a writer with Roger Schank, then a Yale psychology and computer science professor and now a recognized expert on artificial intelligence and learning techniques.

That led to a long career as a technical writer as well as a grant writer, work she continues to do for a number of musical groups, among them Trinity College’s Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival, and the choral Group CONCORA, of which she was once administrator. Ann also writes grants for one non-musical group, Elizabeth Park, in Hartford.

Grant writing is not the kind of work that spaces itself out at regular intervals.

In addition, as she pursued a career as a technical and grant writer, Ann continued to play viola in local symphony orchestras.

“Every orchestra along I-95,” she jokes, ticking off Norwalk, Bridgeport, Meriden, and Wallingford symphonies.

She also became involved in professional organizations of musicians, giving her experience with the skills necessary for musical administration.

“I learned a lot about managing non-profits from those experiences. Many musicians don’t have management skills. They live in practice rooms,” she says.

After all her years playing in orchestras, Ann says she is not a morning person. After getting home from playing, she says it takes time to unwind so by habit she gets to bed late, and rises late as well.

The Robbie Collomore concerts, at 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, should fit nicely into Ann’s schedule.

Keeping all her concerts, meetings and rehearsals straight, Ann says, is not a problem. And that includes making time to practice the viola.

“I’ve done it all for so long that it all just gets burned into my brain each week,” she says.

But, just in case, there is a plan B: Ann has started carrying a little red notebook where she writes everything down.

The Robbie Collomore Concert Series sponsored by the Chester Historical Society hosts four concerts on the following Sundays at 5 p.m. in the Chester Meeting House:

For tickets or information, call 860-526-4162 or visit www:collomoreconcerts.org.