Marya Martin Talks 40th Summer Festival

New Zealand-born flautist Marya Martin is celebrating the 40th summer season of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Long Island’s longest-running classical music festival. celebrates its 40th summer season. With 11 concerts across July and August, this year’s festival showcase a theme of “Beethoven as Innovator” alongside six of the festival’s favorite works from four decades of commissioning new music, with pieces by Elizabeth Brown, Kenji Bunch, Eric Ewazen, Bruce MacCombie, Kevin Puts, and Ned Rorem.

Following schooling in New Zealand and study at Auckland University, the Yale School of Music and the Paris Conservatoire, Marya Martin studied with Jean-Pierre Rampal, the artist responsible for the widespread popularity of the flute in our time.

After winning a number of competitions in Europe and the U.S., she was able to get management, performed debut concerts in New York, Los Angeles, Washington – “and then started playing everywhere I could,” Martin recalls in an interview James Lane Post editor Jessica Mackin-Cipro. “Such is the life of a solo musician, if you’re lucky.”

Of Bridgehampton’s Chamber Music Festival, Martin says that “ First and foremost, I want to offer our audiences a relaxed, convivial experience. I hope that no one will think a classical concert will be overwhelming or mystifying — I always talk to the audience, and all the artists and I are committed to communicating our enjoyment of the music we play.

“This is our 40th festival, and we decided to spend time with the great Beethoven, a name everyone thinks of as synonymous with the whole art form — but we want to highlight what an innovator he was, and we have programmed works that are not played all the time but are real gems that audiences will love.”

Original article by Jessica Mackin-Cipro, James Lane Post, June 26, 2023.