The 2003-2004 season will emphasize this basic ambition by presenting new series by North Carolina’s two foremost organizations for the arts and humanities: The N.C. School of the Arts and the N.C. Humanities Council. The N.C. School of the Arts, dedicated to the training of professional performers, will open a four-program series with the AJ Fletcher opera singers in November. Other programs will feature the dance, film and drama departments. The N.C. Humanities Council will present three lectures on “Discovering North Carolina,” starting in January.
Bea O’Rand, the new president of the Friends of Weymouth, has announced that for the 25th Weymouth season, there will be an expansion of garden activities along with the new and regular programs that have been developed and strengthened over the years.
Gardens
Weymouth Dirt Gardeners work the soil, planting, weeding, mulching and planning the twenty-three designated garden areas. In September there will be two opportunities to see what they have done: “Supper on the Grounds” on Thursday, Sept. 25, from 5 to 8 p.m. and the Weymouth Showcase Garden Tour on Tuesday, Sept. 30 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Six showcase gardens have been chosen by area garden clubs. Dirt Gardeners and Moore County Master Gardener Volunteers will be stationed throughout to provide tips on fall gardening, accompanied by landscapers and garden designers.
The Women of Weymouth will have a renovated house to work with for the annual Christmas at Weymouth celebrations — the result of a three-year, $500,000 restoration by the volunteers of Weymouth who raised the money and supervised every phase of the work. The Women of Weymouth will also present cooking demonstrations with Elizabeth Norfleet, author of “An Appetite for Art,” on Oct. 6 and 13.
James and Katharine Boyd, who built and developed Weymouth, enjoyed both outdoor and indoor activities. They designed the original gardens, and with their literary connections filled the house with the most prominent writers and musicians of their day.
Ragan Series
This tradition continues with the Ragan Writers Series, which opens Sunday, Sept. 28 with North Carolina’s best-selling author Clyde Edgerton, author of “Raney” and “Walking Across Egypt,” whose new book “Lunch at the Piccadilly” takes a sidewise glance at convalescent homes. The Ragan Writers Series committee headed by Joan Scott will also present Sara Foster of Foster’s Markets in the Triangle to talk about food and cooking; Hugh Morton, owner of Grandfather Mountain and ardent conservationist and nature photographer; Johnetta Cole, president of Bennett College in Greensboro, president emerita of Spelman College and professor emerita of anthropology, women’s studies, and African American studies at Emory University, a nationally known African American intellectual and author of several books, including “Conversations: Straight Talk With America’s Sister President.” William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and author of more than 30 books, will present “North Carolina Slave Narratives.”
Since it was created by the N.C. Writers Network, the N. C. Literary Hall of Fame has inducted 36 writers with a grant from the N. C. Department of Cultural Resources. The big project for this season is to obtain copies of books by every writer honored in the Hall of Fame. Weymouth volunteer librarian Dotty Starling heads the project.
Musical Events
A chamber music concert at Weymouth is more than a treat for the ear. The eye takes in the elegance of the great room with its Adamesque architectural details, and the proximity of the performers creates a synergetic effect with the individual members of the audience.
Katharine Boyd had statewide experience with the N.C. Symphony and the founding of the N.C. School of the Arts, but she reserved the great room for her personal approach to music — her support of the New School of Music in Philadelphia and the concerts given by its Curtis String Quartet as “quartet in residence” at Weymouth.
It was these concerts that led the Boyds’ longtime friend, playwright Paul Green, to insist that Weymouth be a home for music. He arranged for his granddaughter, cellist Nancy Green, then a recent graduate of the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, to give the first concert. In a letter to the editor of The Pilot in that spring of 1980 a visitor to the Sandhills praised the “virtuoso performance…worthy of Carnegie Hall…” and added, “I wished all of my music-loving friends in Cincinnati could have been present.” The pianist that day was the late James Swisher from the faculty of Davidson College.
This first concert set the standard and the pattern for future concerts — virtuoso performances by faculty members from the colleges and universities of North Carolina and musical artists with North Carolina connections. Since that first concert there have been performances by faculty members from the N. C. School of the Arts, Duke and Wake Forest Universities, UNC-Chapel Hill, Greensboro and Wilmington, East Carolina University, Meredith College and by first desk players from the N.C. Symphony.
Last October Nancy Green returned to Weymouth with her cousin, pianist Frederick Moyer, to present a benefit concert sponsored by the Green family through the Paul Green Foundation. The cause was the formation of the Katharine Boyd Memorial Music Fund to subsidize the Weymouth concerts, so that no matter how much the costs might rise due to inflation, these concerts would always be a perk of Weymouth membership, free of additional charge. The goal for the fund is $100,000; it has nearly reached the halfway mark.
New Season
For the 2003-2004 season the music committee, chaired by Elaine Sills, has selected a sprightly mixture of instrumental and vocal music ranging from baroque to contemporary. World-touring pianist Eric Larsen from the artist faculty of the NC School of the Arts will begin the season with a program that opens with Mozart and closes with Chopin, featuring George Crumb’s “Little Suite for Christmas” – based on Giotto’s Nativity frescoes in Padua, Italy – and Franz Liszt’s “Legend of St. Francis of Paula Walking on the Waves.”
In November Professor Donald Oehler, clarinetist, from UNC-Chapel Hill will bring some very impressive friends to Weymouth — N.C. Symphony Assistant Concertmaster Rebekah Binford, N.C. Symphony’s principal cellist Bonnie Thron and pianist Jane Hawkins of the Duke University faculty. They will perform Oliver Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” written while he was a French prisoner of war in the early 1940s — a time when he certainly thought his world had ended. The rest of the program will be pretty much ladies’ time: “From the Green Mountains” for clarinet, violin and piano by Jeanne Singer and “Tres Lent” for cello and piano by Joan Tower.
Ladies’ time will continue in January with mezzo-soprano Ellen Williams from Meredith College and soprano Terry Rhodes. The program of vocal duets will include music by Brahms, Faure, Chausson, Britten, Hoekman, Hoiby and Hess.
The ladies continue their run in February with the Carolina Piano Trio. Barbara McKenzie, director of Wilmington’s Chamber Music Society, has chosen works by two American composers: a piano trio by Charles Wakefield Cadman and an American idiom setting by Paul Schoenfield called “Café Music.”
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Professor Richard Luby returns in a new role as an interpreter of French music, joined by his wife, soprano Susan Klenabow, in a program of songs by Debussy, Franck and Faure. Luby holds degrees from Curtis Institute, Juilliard and Yale School of Music. Klenabow is a music professor and director of choral activities at Chapel Hill.
Members of the Weymouth Music Committee are all performing musicians. The newest member is soprano Robin Lynne Frye, who has returned to the Sandhills after an extensive singing career in New York. In April a group of her friends and former colleagues will present a program ranging from polyphonic motets to big band jazz and folk tunes — an unusual blend of melody by Equal Voices.
The Weymouth Chamber Music Concerts are held at 3 p.m. on selected Sunday afternoons. They are open to the public, and tickets are available at the door. Concerts are free to members.
For further information please see or call the office at (910) 692 6261.
