Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Set among the Litchfield Hills of the lower Berkshires, the Festival traces its roots to the Battell family, who started hosting summer concerts on the Norfolk town green in the 1880s.

They recruited a 70-piece orchestra of musicians from the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera, and paid for a special train to transport the instrumentalists to the Litchfield Hills.

Sibelius, for example, composed his tone poem The Oceanides for the Stoeckels and conducted it in the Music Shed during his only trip to the United States on June 4, 1915.

Since that time, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival has played host to thousands of emerging young professional musicians.

The success of the experimental hall led to the construction of the Music Shed which was built for the Litchfield County Choral Union and opened in 1906.