The Craftsbury Chamber Players, a summer chamber music festival group founded in 1966, only performed in Craftsbury during its first four years. The Players then moved its concerts to the Hardwick Town House and eventually expanded to the Burlington area — currently the Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester — while retaining its original moniker.
Yet Craftsbury is still the Players’ spiritual home. Music director and cellist Fran Rowell and her sister, Mary, a violinist, live there and host festival musicians in their houses; their stepmother, the late pianist Mary Anthony Cox, was a festival cofounder. Since the 1980s, many seasons have opened with an outdoor concert on the town green, Craftsbury Common. This summer, the town’s historical society is honoring the group’s 60th year with a small exhibition in the Babcock House Museum called “The Music Plays On.”
The Rowells, along with society cochair Peter Nelson and board member Wendy Turnbull, recently met Seven Days at the tiny museum for a tour. A wall of the main room displays festival memorabilia: photographs of the four founders and other performers, posters and programs, printouts of pull quotes from newspaper coverage over the years. The display — the result of months of sorting through numerous boxes by historical society affiliate officer Susan Houston — also fills a second room.
The sisters, now in their mid-sixties, seemed to hold the whole history of the Players in their heads. They spontaneously rattled off historical minutiae, such as the fact that the Players’ initial 25-year lease of the Hardwick Town House, which the group helped restore, cost a dollar. They recalled that one of the four Juilliard- and Yale University-trained founders, violinist Ann Rylands, was thrilled to be asked to help judge the town’s fiddle contest. (Another wall of the museum’s main room is dedicated to Craftsbury’s now-defunct fiddle and banjo contests, and a third to the town band.)
The Craftsbury Chamber Players formed when a group of Manhattan academics who summered near Caspian Lake requested that their Juilliard friends come up to play. There was no performance space in the Greensboro area, so the group chose the dining hall at Sterling School in Craftsbury Common. (The boys’ prep school would later become a college that closed this spring.)
Photographs from the first season show the female musicians in floor-length gowns. What they played, according to an original program on display, was similarly formal: a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sonata and a Felix Mendelssohn trio bookending a 20th-century work by Zoltán Kodály. The program set a pattern that Fran, who took over the directorship from Cox in 2014, continues to this day: well-loved standards with a modern work to challenge audiences in between.
At this season’s opening concert, on July 15 in Colchester, the Rowell sisters and visiting musicians performed a Joseph Haydn quartet and a Robert Schumann sonata on either side of Derrick Skye’s “American Mirror,” from 2017. Per Skye’s score, violist Kenji Bunch asked the audience of about 50 to hum during the first part and clap during the second, which they readily did.
Among Vermont’s summer chamber music series, perhaps only the 75-year-old Marlboro Music festival predates the Craftsbury Chamber Players. Even the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t interrupt its longevity: Reviving an idea from a 1968 photograph on display of the Players on a parade float, the group performed outdoor concerts on the back of a flatbed truck. Some musicians’ tenures are remarkably long. Mary has played 40 seasons; Bunch, 28; violinist Katherine Winterstein (the Vermont Symphony Orchestra concertmaster), 25; and Fran, 20.
Audiences are equally loyal. Connie Gallagher and his violinist wife, Nancy, have been attending Burlington-area Craftsbury Chamber Players concerts since the 1980s, long before the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival and the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival appeared on the local scene.
“When the season starts, we feel like we’re at home,” Gallagher said. “Every year, we wonder what they’re going to play.”
Five of the season’s six weekly concerts, repeated in Colchester and Hardwick, remain. Highlights include Calais soprano Mary Bonhag singing Susan Botti’s Bird Songs on Wednesday and Thursday, July 29 and 30.
The Craftsbury Chamber Players’ longevity will continue, thanks in part to an unexpected gift for its 60th anniversary: a check from the former chamber music series Scrag Mountain Music in Marshfield, which divided its assets between five Vermont music groups when cofounders Bonhag and Evan Premo dissolved it last year.
And, as Fran quipped, “There’s no reason to stop.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Craftsbury Chamber Players Toasts 60 Years With New Season, Historical Exhibit”
This article appears in July 22 • 2026.
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