The Frost School of Music at Festival Napa Valley is a sumptuous experience. Set in the beautiful Northern California wine country, the program brings top classical music students from the Frost School and across the country to learn from stellar chamber and orchestral music artists. They perform in gorgeous settings for an enthusiastic, discriminating audience.
But for Frost School graduate student Justin Kinchen, the Festival Napa Valley program offers even more—the chance to elevate his artistry by performing with those artist teachers as a peer. "You have the ability to work with faculty shaping musical ideas together," says Kinchen, an extraordinarily accomplished musician who is a classical violinist and jazz trumpet player and composer. "It's more of a collaboration."
This summer, Kinchen's faculty collaborators included Dean Shelton G. Berg, who joined Kinchen, on trumpet, to perform the younger man's jazz composition.
That experience and the Festival Napa Valley program encapsulated the qualities that drew Kinchen, a Henry Mancini Institute (HMI) Fellow who just received his bachelor's and is pursuing a double master's degree in classical violin and jazz composition, to the Frost School. "It is so rare to find a top-rated institution willing to go above and beyond for students with diverse talents," he says. "The faculty know me well, and they look out for me. They support my career."
The Frost School began partnering with Festival Napa Valley in 2021 on the program, which this summer took place from July 3 to 21. The students, teachers, and guest artists provide instrumental performances at the Festival (there is also an opera and vocal arts series.) This being Napa Valley, there are culinary and vintner events at the region's famed wineries. The first half of the Festival focuses on chamber music, and the second half on orchestral music.
Twenty-five of the 60 students, as did many of the faculty, hailed from the Frost School. Visiting artists included members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, David Kim; acclaimed violinist Ray Chen and GRAMMY-winning trio Time for Three. Berg played with the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra in a program of Mancini's music, part of the year-long celebration of the famed film and television composer's 100th birthday.
"The partnership is designed to allow Frost students and faculty to work with students from all over the country and collaborate with leading chamber and orchestral artists in performance," says Frost School professor Jennifer Grim, an acclaimed flutist and solo and chamber musician who is the artistic administrator for the Frost School of Music at Festival Napa Valley program. "Many festivals have chamber music and orchestral programs like ours, but very few have faculty artists working side by side with students. It's very rare."
Grim says that collaboration vastly enriches the experience for both the students, many of them graduate students starting their careers, and their teachers. "Many of the pieces that students are performing for the first time, the faculty have been performing for decades," she says. "The expertise the faculty provides is not just instructional. Student participants learn the nuances of chamber music while playing alongside their mentors. For students about to embark on their career these detailed nuances are what separates students from professionals."
Grim joined a woodwind quintet that included Frost School students Dylan Neff and Camber Flick, playing Irving Fine's "Partita for Woodwind Quintet," a favorite of Grim's that she's played for 20 years. She said it was immensely gratifying for all of them. "They are very talented musicians, and this collaborative experience pushed them in a way that isn't easily replicated during the school year," Grim says. "You could feel their energy. They played at such a high level I was really impressed and excited. We had a really terrific performance."
The fact that there are so many Frost students and faculty makes the Napa Festival particularly enriching—and fun—for them. Frost School students enjoyed an afternoon pool party at the Napa home of Jeffrey Miller, chair of the Frost School's Dean's Advisory Committee, with gourmet pizza, burgers, and hot dogs.
Grim curated a set of Frost School faculty and student performances for a private event that highlighted the richness of the student-mentor aspect of the festival. They included classical trumpet player and Stamps scholar Terri Rauschenbach with doctoral student and pianist Hongxi Li; Grim with her student Rafael Mendez and percussion student Shane Roderick performing works by composers Orlando "Maraca" Valle and Heraclio Fernández; and Roderick's arrangement of a Mancini medley for marimba, which he performed with Frost percussion professor Svet Stoyanov.
Kinchen played violin in a string quartet with Frost professors Ross Harbaugh and Jodi Levitz, on cello and viola, and lecturer Bettina Mussumeli on violin, as well as with Dean Berg. "It was cool seeing how much trust Dean Berg had in me and how much agency he gave me," Kinchen says. "It established that the place I'm currently in is helping me come into my own as a musician and that I have people around me who want to give me opportunities where I can shine."
