Copious Notes

George Foreman, director of the Norton Center for the Arts, shown standing in the middle of Newlin Hall in August, as the theater was undergoing a rennovation, including replacing all the seats. Photo by Rich Copley | staff.

George Foreman, the impresario who made the Norton Center for the Arts an unlikely cultural hotspot, will leave at the end of this year to become the new director of the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center.

“I’m really excited, flattered and honored,” Foreman said, when reached at his office. “They have some wonderful things going on down there and I hope to build on that.”

The University of Georgia’s president is former Centre College President Michael F. Adams.

“It is a nice set of circumstances,” Foreman said of the prospect of working for Adams again. “I welcome the opportunity to renew that association.”

Foreman said Adams did not pursue him for the position but that Adams’ presence did pique his interest in the opportunity at a time when, “I wasn’t looking for a job.”

At Georgia, Foreman will oversee a concert hall, which is often featured on the public radio program Performance Today, recital hall, fine arts theater and the university chapel.

“I always think the best thing I have done in my career I haven’t done yet,” Foreman said, “and the best thing to happen for the Norton Center hasn’t happened yet.”

If that’s the case, over the last 26 years, Foreman has given himself and his successor tough acts to follow.

Since arriving at the Norton Center in 1983, Foreman brought a who’s who of classical music and popular entertainment stars – from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Dolly Parton – to the cultural complex at Centre College, a school with around 1,200 students in Danville, a town with a population of just over 15,000. For many acts that rolled through the Norton Center’s Newlin Hall and Weisiger Theatre, Danville was the smallest town they played.

In addition to entertainers, the Norton Center hosted the Vice-presidential candidates debate between Republican Dick Cheney and Democrat Joe Lieberman in 2000.

Reflecting on his tenure, Foreman zeroed in on the March performance by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the March 2001 performance of Morton Feldman’s 6-hour-long Second String Quartet by The Flux Quartet as highlights.

“I remember reading about that being done in New York, and I thought, the next place that should happen is Centre College,” said Foreman, who recalled students bringing a couch from the theater’s props department and plopping it in front of the stage for the quarter day performance. Similarly, he delighted that 500 Centre students – “nearly half the student population” – saw the New York Philharmonic.

“My first few years, I got to know the woman this center was named after,” Foreman said of Jane Morton Norton, a Louisville philanthropist. “I hope I have in some way been able to realize her vision of what she wanted this place to be.”

Most recently, Foreman oversaw a $3 million renovation of the Norton Center that will debut later this week with a season-opening presentation of a touring production of Camelot.

Foreman is also the founder of the Great American Brass Band Festival, an event that draws tens-of-thousands of visitors to Danville each year, and the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, which brings members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill Memorial Day weekend.

A press release from Centre said a national search for a new director for the Norton Center will commence immediately. Milton Reigelman, who has held many posts at Centre, including acting president, will serve as acting director of the center and Debra Hoskins will be the assistant director.

Since we ran a story yesterday citing the current renovation project at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, which will be unveiled early this fall, it seemed like a good time to show a few other pictures we caught down in Danville that did not run with the story.

George Foreman, director of the Norton Center for the Arts, stands in the center of seatless Newlin Hall. The new seating will be more curved and comfortable for patrons. The crane, on stage, is for painters brightening up the theater interior. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

The lobby of the Norton Center is something of a staging area for construction. The wall to the women's rest room was built out to double the number of facilities.

Without ceiling tiles in place, you can see the top of the old lobby wall to the women's rest room that now fall's inside the expanded ladies facilities in the Norton Center for the Arts.

Charlie Snowden (standing) and Tim Abbott of Cincinnati-based Midwest Accessibilty work on the new elevator in the Norton Center that will help the theater comply with requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wes Chaffin, Karen Sherwood, Angie Young, Dana Bart and Deborah Hoskins have a laugh as the put together season brochures for the Norton Center for the Arts 2009-10 season.

The nearly completed Weisiger Theatre offers a preview of what Newlin Hall will look like when it is done. Photo courtesy of the Norton Center for the Arts.

Norton Center for the Arts director George Foreman presents New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel with his Kentucky Colonel certificate. You can see video of the presentation at the New York Philharmonic website. This photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

As the New York Philharmonic has made its way through the Eastern United States, fans have been kept up to date with a photo and video tour diary on the orchestra’s website. The Danville edition posted late Monday with some great photos by NY Phil photographer Chris Lee and a video of Maestro Lorin Maazel receiving his Kentucky Colonel Award from Norton Center for the Arts impresario George Foreman. The photos take viewers from the tarmac at Bluegrass Airport to backstage at the Norton Center and after the show.

Outgoing New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel will conduct the orchestra in Danville Thursday night. Photo by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

It didn’t start as a grand plan, although it is an ambitious idea.

Early in his career as director of the ­Norton Center for the Arts at Centre ­College in Danville, George Foreman brought in the Cleveland Orchestra for a concert. The 1983 performance of music by Franz Schubert, Dmitri Shostakovich and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, under the baton of Eduardo Mata, was undoubtedly a coup for the still-young arts center, which has since presented a veritable who’s who of classical and pop artists.

And Foreman wondered: What if he could bring the top five American orchestras to Danville during his career?

Cleveland was a start on the list, which at the time appeared to include the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“It was such a preposterous idea to bring all the great orchestras to Central ­Kentucky,” Foreman says.

It has been slow going, too.

It was 20 years before the next group, the Philadelphia Orchestra, played the ­Norton Center in 2003. But Foreman’s unofficial series seems to be picking up speed with Thursday’s appearance by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by outgoing music director Lorin Maazel. It took only six years to book Foreman’s third major.

The New York Philharmonic’s appearance will be its first Kentucky concert in more than 35 years. The orchestra’s last appearance in the ­commonwealth was at the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum in September 1973.

“What fills Memorial Coliseum other than winning Wildcats?” the Lexington Leader review asked, “Obviously the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Pierre Boulez.”

That concert attracted 9,000-11,000 patrons. It will be a considerably smaller crowd in the Norton Center’s 1,430-seat Newlin Hall on Thursday, but there is still a lot of excitement surrounding the concert by one of the majors.

The infrequency of major orchestra concerts helps explain that buzz, in part. But there is the reason you don’t see major orchestras on the Norton Center or anyone else’s schedule every season.

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