Brunswick, Maine – Bowdoin International Music Festival Director and co-founder Lewis Kaplan has announced that he will step aside after fifty years of leadership, following the Festival’s 2014 season. The Bowdoin Festival plans to celebrate Mr. Kaplan’s remarkable tenure as director, commemorate five decades of service to the classical music world, and announce its new artistic director in 2014.

Begun as a five-concert summer series on the Bowdoin College campus in June, 1964, the Bowdoin Festival has grown into one of the world’s premier summer training programs for exceptional classical musicians. It now provides more than 250 students from five continents with an intense immersion in the practice and performance of chamber music and solo repertoire, and presents concerts featuring world-renowned performers to sold-out audiences for six weeks each summer.

At the invitation of co-founder Robert K. Beckwith, Kaplan brought the Aeolian Chamber Players, a mixed-timbre chamber group he formed in 1961, to Brunswick in 1964 to perform a summer concert series and to discuss the creation of a summer music school on the Bowdoin College campus. Thus the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival was born. In 1965, the Festival accepted its first students and commissioned works from three composers, beginning a tradition of introducing new music to classical music audiences that continues today in the form of the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music.

Highlights of the early years included commissions, premieres, and appearances at Bowdoin by composers George Crumb, Luciano Berio, William Bolcom, George Rochberg, Ralph Shapey, Elliott Carter, Meyer Kupferman, Morton Subotnick and Elliott Schwartz. Early performers included conductor Arthur Fiedler, violin virtuoso Michael Rabin, flutist Julius Baker, and as students, Emanuel Ax and Fred Sherry. More recent luminaries have included Yefim Bronfman, Roberto Diaz, Glenn Dicterow, Jamie Laredo, Midori, Paul Neubauer, Ruggiero Ricci, and Liang Wang. 

Teaching faculty and guest artists have included first chairs from the New York Philharmonic, the Boston and Chicago Symphonies, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras; important conservatories worldwide; and the Juilliard, Shanghai, and Ying Quartets. Many of the Festival’s students have gone on to great success, including violinists Jennifer Koh, Rachel Barton Pine, Baiba Skride, and Albena Danilova (the first female concertmistress of the Vienna Philharmonic), David Coucheron (concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony), members of the Artemis, Brentano, Navarra, Pacifica and Ying Quartets, and composer Sebastian Currier, winner of the 2007 Grawemeyer award.

Originally a program of Bowdoin College, the Festival became an independent nonprofit after the passing of co-founder Beckwith, and then adopted a new name – Bowdoin International Music Festival – recognizing its global reach under Kaplan’s leadership.

Chair of the Festival’s Board of Trustees, James T. Morgan, said “Lewis Kaplan's towering achievement is a teaching festival that is secure, fresh, and dynamic as it approaches its 50 anniversary. The Bowdoin Festival is an ever-evolving, living thing, not a music museum. I know I speak for the entire board when I salute him and thank him for all he does that makes us proud and eager to see that the collegial mentoring atmosphere he fosters lasts long into the Festival’s vibrant future.”

Kaplan is a senior member of the violin and chamber music faculties of The Juilliard School, The Mannes College of Music, and Visiting Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music in London. He taught for 20 years at the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg and has given master classes at most major conservatories in Europe and Asia. He has recorded for Columbia, CRI, Folkways and Odyssey Records, including a Grammy nomination for a recording of George Crumb’s Night of the Four Moons with the Aeolian Chamber Players. He has been a member of the jury of the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, long considered one of the world’s most prestigious competitions, for the past 3 violin competitions, as well as many other international competitions. 

Mr. Kaplan is a recipient of the Knight’s Cross from the President of Germany and has held the William Schuman Scholar’s Chair at Juilliard.  He has also received the Teacher Recognition Award from the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program.

The search for a new artistic director will begin immediately. For more information, write to info@bowdoinfestival.org.