25 Years at GTMF: Rita Porfiris
It is so obvious from your very first day as a Grand Teton Music Festival musician that this festival is “all the things.”
I first went to GTMF when I was a member of the Houston Symphony. The prospect of spending 3 weeks out of the oppressive summer heat and away from giant flying roaches clearly was appealing! I quickly fell in love with everything else about the festival: the inspiring views, hikes, incredible performances and colleagues, and sense of adventure and possibility that every musician carries both on and off the stage.
I continued coming to GTMF when I left the Houston Symphony for academia, this time because even though I now lived in a beautiful place on the side of a mountain in Connecticut, I wanted to keep playing with this marvelous orchestra and keep that sense of adventure alive.
And now that I am living in Iceland and playing with the Iceland Symphony, I keep coming back because every year it is like a family reunion. The good kind, where you want to get into good trouble with all your cousins, not the kind where you have to hide the good china. Something magical happens during those epic Table Mountain hikes, scary-yet-thrilling whitewater events, unintended wildlife encounters, huckleberry shake brain freezes. Something magical happens when Maestro Runnicles does his thing on the podium, and even more so when it’s the mountain-painter himself, Mahler. When Garrick Ohlsson is able to transfix the orchestra playing all five Beethoven Piano Concerti twice in two days. When you are practicing and moose and fox come by to listen (Bartok gives them the munchies).
Scenery. Music. Animals. People. Every year I look so forward to the sum of those parts making something wondrous happen. Thank you, GTMF, for All The Things.