This year's Lakes Area Music Festival will take audiences on a musical tour of the globe. The adventure starts with a concert at 2 p.m. Sunday at Tornstrom Auditorium in Brainerd and will feature musicians from the Brainerd lakes area.
This will be the first of many concerts in the festival's 2017 season. All festival concerts are free.
The second concert will be 7 p.m. Wednesday and will include baritone John Taylor Ward who will transport the audience to a variety of distant lands accompanied by piano, guitar and
percussion. Ward also will give a pre-concert lecture at 6:30 p.m.
Ward, the festival's associate artistic director, is returning this year for his ninth season.
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Sunday's concert will begin the world tour in England with a fanfare by Benjamin Britten played by Jon Crust, Chris Fogderud and John Koopman, all on trumpet. Then on to Italy, where Koopman and Crust will remain on trumpet, Fogderud will switch to horn and Ryan Webber will join them on trombone to play a "Canzona" by Giovanni Gabrieli.
Next stop on the musical tour will be Austria, where a lively allegro section from a Beethoven piano trio will demonstrate that piano and strings can make noise, too. The trio will be performed by Ava Figliuzzi, violin, Sophie Stubbs, cello, and Scott Lykins, piano.
Then it's time to tango in Argentina with Jess Wilson, flute; Amber Bolstad, oboe; Jennie Planer, clarinet; Livia Goulette, bassoon; Kate Campbell, horn, and Chris Bolstad, cajon, will play "Libertango" by Astor Piazolla.
A heavenly interlude then will change the mood: "How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place" from the Brahms "German Requiem" will be performed by the Legacy Chorale of Greater Minnesota with Sarah Aamot, director, and Laura Raedeke, piano.
The acapella group Consensus Ensemble will sing pieces called "Horizons," "Love Is," and "Quick, We Have But a Second."
Joey Tranvik on piano will perform Frederic Chopin's rousing "Heroic Polonaise."
The concert will conclude with a "Concerto Grosso" by Arcangelo Corelli played by the Lakes Area String Ensemble with Leslie Zander and Bobbi French, violins, and Scott Lykins, cello. Alexander Corbett will conduct.
Ward will guide the audience in Wednesday's concert to distant lands by way of a cabaret in New York.
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"When I was asked to produce a show for Joe's Pub, a notable New York cabaret that normally hosts the likes of Dolly Parton and Amy Winehouse not to mention Al Franken in his pre-politician years, I knew that no ordinary classical song recital would do," Ward stated in a news release. "Instead, I took on the project of presenting classical music in the context of popular and folk songs, trying to see what these different traditions had to say to and about each
other."
The result is a program structured around three large works of classical music: Robert Schumann's "Liederkreis" song cycle; George Crumb's "The Ghosts of Alhambra;" and selected songs of Charles Ives. Selections from these works will be interspersed with popular and traditional works that Ward will announce from the stage.
Each of the selections "shares a sense of the far off-traveling to distant lands, regarding vistas, plunging into the inner depths of memory, and inhabiting the austere mystery of the faraway," Ward stated.
Ward will be joined by Tanya Gabrielian, piano, Daniel Lippel, guitar, and Doug
Perry, percussion.
The Lakes Area Music Festival, an annual summer series attracting many leading instrumental and vocal performers, takes place July 30 through Aug. 20. All performances are at Tornstrom Auditorium in Brainerd. Concerts are free, with no tickets required. More than 130 instrumentalists and vocalists from 24 states and three continents will be in the Brainerd Lakes area as guest artists.
Visit www.lakesareamusic.org for more information.
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