Friends of Music at Guilford regretfully announces the cancellation of its annual Labor Day Weekend Festival due to the COVID pandemic.
Traditionally, the two-concert event includes a Saturday evening organ program, and a Sunday afternoon lawn concert at the Organ Barn in Guilford, featuring the Guilford Festival Orchestra. The organ concert highlights Friends of Music’s 1897 “tracker-action” pipe organ, which was installed in the barn in 1964 by late organist A. Graham Down, founder of the annual event.
In making the announcement, Friends of Music president Jenifer Ambler noted that this is the first time the event has been cancelled in its 55-year history. “The organ program, being indoors, has always gone ahead, no matter the weather,” Ambler said. “The barn is too small, however, for our 45-piece orchestra and the several hundred folks in our audience, so on a handful of occasions the orchestral program has been moved by rain to either Guilford Central School or Broad Brook Community Center. But this is our first-ever cancellation.”