VERO BEACH — When the young virtuoso violinist Caroline Goulding plays at an Orchid Island fundraiser this month, the 20-year-old’s sophistication is sure to awe supporters of the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, just as it did when she first played here at the age of 15.
Sophistication will no doubt surface as the audience meets Anne Berquist that day for the first time. The French-born cellist will not be performing though. She is making her debut as the orchestra’s new executive director. Vero is the next stop in a career that segued from performance to arts management when she earned graduate degrees from the Sorbonne and the University of Missouri.
Like Goulding, who began playing at age 3, Berquist took up the cello in early childhood. She was 5 when her father enrolled her in a pilot program at a music conservatory north of Paris. Half her days were spent in academic studies, the other half in music – “hours and hours a day,” she says. “I learned so much about music that I breathed it.”
Today, the air she breathes is the salt air of Central Beach. Every day she drives south along the ocean to the Fort Pierce offices of ACO. She is tasked with not only running the January- to-April season of the professional chamber orchestra, but building its endowment and audience.
The orchestra is releasing its first CD this season, and is testing out performance spaces in Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens.
The Vero- and Stuart-based 35-member orchestra began 21 years ago when its first conductor, Andy McMullan, retired to Vero. It was Mc- Mullan who through his connections in the music world brought n Goulding to Vero.
McMullan’s successor, Stewart Robertson, is a Grammy-nominated Scottish-born former conductor of the Florida Grand Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. He can take credit for bringing Berquist to Vero.
“She’s very sophisticated personally, and she’s had some pretty sophisticated work experiences,” Robertson says. He cites in particular her stint at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and her post as head of the innovative Fontana Chamber Arts group in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a city that regards itself as a mecca for the arts.
“We were blown away by her accomplishments,” says Michael La- Porta, ACO president and part of the search committee put in place with the resignation of Matthew Stover, who held the directorship for a year and a half before moving on to a new career in technology.
This summer, the committee holed up in an Orlando airport hotel for a weekend along with Robertson who flew in from Scotland – and flew back without ever leaving the airport. Berquist was one of what LaPorta called “a highly qualified field of candidates” interviewed that weekend.
The committee’s first choice, she accepted the offer “because she wanted to work with Stewart Robinson,” LaPorta says.
“I really like Stewart Robertson,” Berquist says. “His artistic excellence is one of the reasons I want to be a part of the organization. “He always wants something well-defined, well thought through.”
Like Stewart, she sees the organization’s mission as educational in many ways.
“We have a role to educate our audience to the next generation of composers. If we miss that portion, we don’t do our mission.”
Berquist arrives from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she ran a school for the performing arts that included three youth orchestras. Prior, she was executive director of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, and for seven years was executive director of Fontana Chamber Arts.
It was while running the chamber music society in Kalamazoo that Berquist first faced the challenge of easing an audience into new music.
“I was running a series and a festival and I was commissioning many pieces by well-known composers and emerging composers. I was in the Midwest with a very traditional audience that loved chamber music. It was a well-cultivated audience but they also know what they like and what they don’t like.”
She points to an existing program at Indian River State College, a seminar by Robertson to give concertgoers an idea of what to expect at the concert.
The course is given in the morning, attended mostly by retirees; Berquist would like to make such seminars available to younger, working people too.
She is also studying the possibility of having concerts outside of the concert hall. “I would like to play in nontraditional venues,” she says. “If the venue is acoustically sound, it can be done.”
Music education is another avenue of expansion for ACO, she says. “I’m very concerned about that. Everyone on earth should have some musical education. It creates so much in yourself.” With cuts in arts education, ACO has “a very important role,” she says. At the performing arts school in Ann Arbor, Berquist brought in renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor to do a teacher training seminar.
This season, ACO inaugurates a program of commissioning new works, with the first by San Francisco composer David Conte. Funded by a Stuart family, the program will fund one commission annually, which Robertson intends to record and eventually release on CD.
“Every community is different, but we need to identify who is the demographic here,” says Berquist. “Who should come to our concert? We want to keep our current audience, our very faithful audience and continue the trust we’ve built.”
She says it is precisely because of Stewart Robertson, and the musical selections he makes, that top musicians want to play with the orchestra.
“That tells you a lot of things right there. They praise the programming and how it’s well thought through. Stewart has been able to create that, from the sound to the experience to the audience.”
Berquist’s first introduction to the states was through Columbia, Missouri, where she attended graduate school.
She had studied music performance at one of Europe’s top music conservatories, the École Normale de Musique, in Paris. She became a professor of cello at the Versailles Conservatory as well as in Saint-Malo in Brittany. There, she had the opportunity to take over administration of a touring orchestra and choir.
“They are two different worlds,” she says of her first foray from orchestra to administration. “It’s frustrating when you’re a musician and someone doesn’t understand what you need. I would like to be the synergy between the two. “
Enjoying the transition, she decided to add an MBA to her resume, enrolling at the Sorbonne. By then, she had met and married an American and had a baby girl. Graduate school meant rising at 4 a.m. to take the train from Brittany to Paris, an hour-and-a-half commute.
“That’s who I am,” she says with a laugh. “I always work hard. And I had the good luck to have my parents not far away.”
As part of her degree studies, she got an internship that led to a paid post at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, helping to produce concerts, operas and ballets as well as recording projects.
From there, she went on to work at Disneyland Paris.
After the birth of two more children, the family moved to the U.S., with her continuing studies and career taking her from Missouri to Michigan.
She says she is happy to be near the ocean again. “It reminds me of my childhood,” she says.
A month after her arrival, though, she had yet to walk the beach. “I’m not doing much more than working,” she says.
“I am someone who likes to challenge herself. I believe that you learn until the last minute of your life. That’s part of my background. It’s never good enough.”
The Goulding concert and reception is Dec. 11 from 4:30 to 6:30 at Orchid Island Beach Club. Tickets are $125 and must be purchased in advance. Call 772-460-0850 or 866- 310-7521.
The ACO’s season is listed on the group’s website: www.atlanticclassicalorchestra.com.
