Blairsville Chamber Music Festival returns bigger than ever

Due to an overwhelming positive response in its previous years, the Blairsville Chamber Music Festival will return for another year from June 26-29.

The festival was founded in 2022 by Blairsville native Sarah Marshall and her husband, violinist Avital Mazor. The couple was based in New York, but after multiple visits to Blairsville, Mazor brought friends and performed a concert in the town.

“People kept asking us to have more concerts and musicians, friends kept wanting to come back and more and more people heard about the festival,” Mazor said.

“The response was really incredible,” Marshall said. “People were really excited about it, and we had a really nice turnout despite just having an impromptu event.”

That spurned the creation of the Blairsville Chamber Music Festival in 2022.

Chamber music is classical music played by a small ensemble, as opposed to a larger body like an orchestra. This allows for a more intimate performance at smaller venues and also allows for the talents of individual musicians to shine.

“We kept coming every year, and every year we brought more and more musicians,” Mazor said.

This year will bring about 15 musicians to the festival.

The festival will be comprised of three different events at three different venues on three different days. On June 26, the event will kick off with a piano concert at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

“We actually received a donation, a really generous donation, of a Bechstein piano,” Mazor said. “That was donated to the festival in the past few months, and its new home is that church. We’ll be celebrating that piano.”

The program will be a Ravel Piano Trio and Dvořák Piano Quintet. An outdoor reception will follow in the yard behind the church. The concert will begin at 7 p.m.

On June 27, the festival will take to Veterans Memorial Park Amphitheater for a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

“This is a little bit of a different approach, but instead of just having one soloist for the piece, there’s going to be a different soloist for each season,” Marshall said.

That concert, which will begin at 6 p.m., will also involve some other music, but the focus will be the Four Seasons.

Then, at 1 p.m. on June 29, the string-filled finale will come to United Presbyterian Church, where musicians will perform Brahms String Sextet and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.

Mazor, who was born in Israel, is a freelance violinist who has played in concert halls in New York City, Berlin, London and elsewhere. Marshall grew up in Blairsville and moved to New York after high school, where she met Mazor. The pair have settled back in Blairsville, as of recently.

They’ve also established the Blairsville Music Society, a nonprofit that will support the Music Festival in the future and allow for its growth.

“We hope the nonprofit will be the foundation for not just a festival, but also hopefully ongoing concerts that we can host in town. Not just in the summers, but also throughout the year,” said Mazor, who serves as artistic director of the organization.

“We really wanted to have opportunities to expand it and continue to provide accessible music to the community, so we decided the best way to do that would be to start a nonprofit,” Marshall, nonprofit’s executive director, said.

“That way we can do some fundraising and and possibly apply for some grants that would help us grow the festival,” she added. “Our mission with that is to enrich the cultural life of Blairsville and the surrounding area through the events that we host and to just provide more opportunities for people to experience classical music and interact and engage with the musicians.”

With the overwhelming response to the festival, Marshall and Mazor are hopeful that the festival and other music events in the future will bring the community together and introduce more people to the town of Blairsville.

“I think it really enlivens the town,” Marshall said.

To learn more and RSVP for the Blairsville Chamber Music Festival, visit blairsvillecmf.com.