During an evening of musical gifts and impassioned tributes last Saturday, the Cantabile Youth Singers of Silicon Valley honored Lively Arts’ artistic and executive director Jenny Bilfield with their 2012 Champion of the Arts award at a gala event held in the Stanford Faculty Club.

Cantabile’s artistic director and conductor Elena Sharkova, who presented the award, recalled her astonishment at being invited to perform on the stage with the Kronos Quartet at Stanford (she sent herself Jenny’s e-mail invitation three times!). Other congratulations and heartfelt words of thanks came flowing in (via video) from composers Steve Reich and David Lang, Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington, the artist Trimpin, pianist Uri Caine, St. Lawrence cellist Christopher Costanza, and singer/director Rinde Eckert as well as colleagues and artist managers, among others.

And in a prepared statement the eminent composer John Adams wrote, “Jenny combines a deep knowledge of all the arts with her own very special personal warmth and humanity. Because of her gentleness and humility it’s easy to miss the point that hers is an exceedingly sharp intellect with discriminating taste and a finely tuned sense of worth in artistic matters. Her arrival at Stanford Lively Arts has been one of the signal events in Bay Area cultural life. She has done much to revitalize musical activity at Stanford and her vision and imagination are providing a model for campus arts activities throughout the country. We are immensely fortunate to have her in our midst.”

Posted by Robert Cable, Public Relations Manager