Meet the Point CounterPoint Foundation’s Board of Directors

Kelley brings extensive sales, marketing, and business development expertise to the Point CounterPoint Foundation Board. She held leadership roles with Pillsbury, Dole, Ingram, and UL Solutions  and has served as treasurer on several nonprofit boards.  A committed community volunteer, she and her family have hosted high school exchange students from Germany and Ecuador, and she previously served as an investor and advisor to Bridges for Parkinson’s.  

Now retired, Kelley focuses on caregiving for her mother, who is living with Alzheimer’s disease.  She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree from the University of Michigan. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Keith and their daughter, GiGi, attends the University of South Carolina. Kelley enjoys gardening, tennis, pickleball, and traveling.

Kelley joined the Point CounterPoint Foundation Board out of a deep respect for the camp’s mission and a commitment to ensuring its future for generations to come.

As a musician, Anne Tyson’s greatest love is playing and coaching chamber music, and she believes deeply in its power to transform lives. She assisted Jenny Beck in reviving the music program after Point CounterPoint was closed for a summer in 2007, and served as PCP’s music director for four subsequent summers.

Anne is a versatile collaborative pianist, performing with both instrumentalists and singers. She has been a coach and rehearsal pianist for several opera companies, including D’Oyly Carte, Kent Opera and Opera North in Great Britain and Boston Lyric Opera and Connecticut Opera in the U.S., and was staff accompanist at the Académie Européenne de Musique in Aix-en-Provence and the Abbaye de Royaumont.  She has also served as an accompanist and vocal coach at New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, and Boston University. She maintains a private piano and coaching studio in Boston and is on faculty at New England Conservatory Preparatory school.

Robert attended PointCounterpoint from 1966 to 1969, playing both timpani and cello. After studies with Bernard Greenhouse and Janos Starker, he taught cello at SUNY-Potsdam and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, along the way playing with the New York City Opera and the National Symphony. He later transitioned to a law career but continued performing, presenting the complete Bach Cello Suites in a single concert in Baltimore, Blacksburg VA, and at James Madison University. He also appeared as soloist with various orchestras in and around Washington D.C. He recently retired as Music Director of the Gettysburg Chamber Music Workshop, and his extensive writings on music have appeared in STRINGS magazine, CelloBello.org, and the Washington Post. He is currently at work on a new edition of the Popper Etudes.

Henry and his wife Catherine have been sending their oldest child to Point Counterpoint for the last eight summers. The son of classical musicians, Henry was surrounded by chamber and orchestral music since childhood and has sought to do the same for his own kids. Having studied both math and computer science in college, Henry also has a lifelong love of all things technical. While this is his first time serving on a board, he is no stranger to community involvement, especially in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York. From parent association work to the local soup kitchen, Henry has a passion for helping create equitable and joyful spaces for members of his community. He believes the world needs more places like Point Counterpoint and wants to do his part to keep it going for many years to come.  He looks forward to bringing energy and enthusiasm to this undertaking.

Pianist Diana Fanning has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and in Europe as a soloist and with cellist Dieuwke Davydov. After a solo recital in Munich, a critic wrote that “Diana Fanning stunned her listeners with the rich spectrum of subtle colors and tonal nuances she revealed. Her recital seized the audience with a veritable deep magic.” Ms. Fanning has performed on numerous occasions as a concerto soloist with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. Vermont Public Television featured her in a program of works by Scarlatti, Ravel and Chopin. Ms. Fanning has been a guest artist with the Takacs, the Jupiter, the Schumann and the Alexander String Quartets. Her CD of works by Janacek, Chopin, and Debussy received enthusiastic reviews in England and the U.S. With her husband Emory Fanning, she was the owner and Director of Point Counterpoint Chamber Music Camp on Lake Dunmore, Vermont, for ten years (1979-88). She is an Affiliate Artist at Middlebury College.

Anne first swam in Lake Dunmore in 1988, while in French School at Middlebury College. Years later, her son James attended PCP as both a cellist and a pianist during Jenny Beck and Anne Tyson’s inaugural summer. James flourished at PCP for a total of seven summers.

Anne graduated from Georgetown University and earned her Masters in German at Middlebury College and in Germany, where she met her husband David. After teaching Latin, German, French and Spanish for several years, she stayed home to raise their son. More recently, Anne directed and produced the documentary Full Circle, about the Great Gull Island Project, and is presently working on another, Up North, about the Hudson Bay Project. Anne and David divide their time between Norfolk, Virginia and NYC and travel as much as life permits. Anne is an avid runner and also enjoys gardening, hiking, cooking, and reading.

Violist RITA PORFIRIS  has performed in major concert halls and music festivals worldwide as a chamber musician, orchestral musician, and as a soloist.  

Currently the Co-Principal Viola of the Iceland Symphony, she was formerly the Professor of Viola and Director of Chamber Music at The Hartt School as well as Co-Director of Music at the Point CounterPoint Chamber Festival in Vermont. Rita has also been on the faculties of New York University, the University of Houston Moores’ School of Music, Florida International University, and the Harlem School for the Arts in New York. She has given master classes, lectures and clinics across the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Iceland, and the Dominican Republic.  

Ms. Porfiris is a member of QuartetES and the Miller-Porfiris Duo. As a founding member of the Plymouth Quartet, she was in-residence at the Ojai Festival, Mainly Mozart, Point Counterpoint, and the Internationale Quartettakademie Prag-Wien-Budapest. She was the recipient of Austria’s prestigious Prix Mercure, a prize winner in the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the Primrose International Viola Competition, and a laureate of the Paolo Borciani International Quartet Competition.  

In her 30 year-long career as an orchestral musician, 15 years of which were spent with the Houston Symphony, she worked under some of the most recognized conductors of the 20-21 Centuries, including Leonard Bernstein, Sergiu Celibidache, Kurt Masur, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Christoph Eschenbach. Equally at home in a.wide variety of genres, Rita has shared the stage with Burt Bacharach, Ray Charles, Bernadette Peters, Lyle Lovett, Rod Stewart, and Tony Bennett, to name a few.  

Highlights of recent seasons include sold-out Bartok Concerto appearances at the historic Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, and a performance of the rarely played Romantic Rhapsody for Violin, Viola and Orchestra by Arthur Benjamin as part of the Miller-Porfiris Duo. In May 2016, the Baltimore Sun declared “Rita Porfiris proved an ideal soloist, as much for her richness of tone and impeccable articulation as for the warmth and subtlety of her phrasing.”  

Rita’s transcriptions for the viola of both classical music staples and pop favorites have been enjoyed worldwide by audiences and performers. Gramophone Magazine called her  transcription of Gliere’s Eight Pieces Op. 39, recorded on the Miller-Porfiris Duo’s second CD “Eight Pieces,”  “satisfying” and “sung with beautiful warmth.”  

Ms. Porfiris received both her BM and MM in Viola Performance from The Juilliard School, studying with William Lincer. Other teachers and mentors included Paul Doktor, Norbert Brainin, and Harvey Shapiro.

www.ritaporfiris.com

Meg brings both business and non-profit experience to the PCP Foundation, inspired by her daughter’s five summers as a camper. Meg is the Founder and Managing Trustee of the Ramsey McCluskey Family Foundation, a private family foundation which funds arts education projects in Eastern Massachusetts. She also serves on the boards of the Community Foundation for MetroWest, the Discovery Museum, and the Lincoln Cultural Council. 

Meg previously spent 20 years in software research, development and consulting, including research positions at Bell Laboratories, teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and co-founding a start-up software company. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Drexel University and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Meg lives with her husband in Lincoln and spends her free time playing in various community bands and orchestras, visiting her three grown children, skiing , golfing and hiking.