Castleton's winning finale

The 2010 Castleton Festival, staged on Lorin and Dietlinde Maazel's estate in Rappahannock County, closed over the weekend with a double-bill of Igor Stravinsky's
"L'histoire du Soldat" ("The Soldier's Tale") and Manuel de Falla's "Master Pedro's Puppet Show."

Here's a review of the productions by The Washington Post's Anne Midgette:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/25/AR2010072502616.html

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The New York Times reports that Lorin Maazel was paid $3.3 million in his last season (2008-09) as music director of the New York Philharmonic. His earnings from the Castleton Festival? Zero.

In 1999, then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told Virginians that they should gratefully accept the city's garbage in this state's commercial landfills because, as he said on PBS' NewsHour, "we're a cultural center, because we're a business center. . . . So this is a reciprocal relationship."

Reciprocally, then, the big bucks that New Yorkers paid for Maazel's services now subsidize a first-rate music festival in the hill country of Virginia.