Maine Arts Commission Staff Are Artists, too - First in a Series

Executive Director Julie Richard

at the Winter Harbor Music Festival

Friday, August 21, 7:30 p.m. Hammond Hall

Julie Richard, soprano and Executive
Director, Maine Arts Commission

When your job is to advance the arts and artists around an entire state, it helps to be a practicing artist yourself.

Many of the staff at the Maine Arts Commission are artists as well as arts administrators, bringing our arts experiences directly from the field to policy, and this personal engagement begins right at the top with MAC’s Executive Director Julie Richard.

Julie is an accomplished soprano who performs throughout the year and state. This Friday, August 21, at 7:30 p.m. she will be singing as part of the Winter Harbor Music Festival’s Summer Sing at Hammond Hall.

The Friday evening’s performance repertoire is the Mozart Coronation Mass (K. 317) conducted by Maestro Anatole Wieck of the University of Maine, joined by the Winter Harbor Music Festival Orchestra.

Julie began singing, “as a kid in that sort of Garrison Keillor, stereotypical Midwestern Lutheran church choir.”

She went on to earn her undergraduate degree in voice and psychology, and has continued to sing all her life in shows and choirs.

Her favorite piece of all time is also, of course, the one she wants to perform again: lauded American composer Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, which she sang with the Greenville Chorale in South Carolina. A true Lauridsen fan, Julie also loves the composer’s O Magnum Mysterium, which she first sang with the Heritage Chorale in Oak Park, IL and has had the opportunity to perform multiple times—and may again this coming December with the current ensemble with which she sings, midcoast Maine’s Vox Nova Chamber Choir conducted by Shannon M. Chase.

One of the vocalists Julie most admires? Country-pop superstar Carrie Underwood. “She has an incredible voice and vocal range and is a really strong singer.”

Catch Julie’s voice first hand this week at the Winter Harbor Music Festival’s Summer Sing Friday, August 21, 7:30 p.m. at Hammond Hall.