2022 Lakes Area Music Festival to be held July 29–August 21
Brainerd, MN—The 14th annual season of the Lakes Area Music Festival will feature 180 artists from the top orchestras and opera companies nationwide. For three weeks this exceptional roster will make the Lakes Area of central Minnesota their musical home, performing three weeks of chamber music, orchestra, and opera– as well as various community outreach activities extending their impact throughout the local community. Nearly all activities are offered for free or with name-your-price ticketing in order to ensure access to anyone interested in attending, regardless of financial means. Here is a link to this year’s Program Booklet.
Gala: Forbidden Love
6:00PM, Friday, July 29, 2022: Dinner + Program
8:00PM, Friday, July 29, 2022: Concert Only
Please order your tickets before midnight on Sunday, July 24.
The timeless story of enraged rivals and forbidden love comes to life at our exclusive Forbidden Love gala! Broadway’s Andrea Ross and Ryan Vona join the Lakes Area Music Festival Symphony in a celebration of favorites from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, including Maria, Somewhere, and Tonight. Our largest fundraiser of the year, this event will include pre-event dinner packages, live auction, and opportunities to show your support for the concerts, education, and outreach activities which make up our season. This concert features instrumental and vocal selections from ‘West Side Story’. It is not a complete production of the musical.
Tribute to the Earth
7:30PM, Saturday, July 30, 2022
2:00PM, Sunday, July 31, 2022
The “Pago a la Tierra” (tribute to the earth) is an ancient Andean ritual of thanksgiving for nature’s bounty. We open our 14th annual season with a tribute to earth, water, and spirit featuring a world premiere by Peruvian-American composer Jimmy López Bellido followed by Jean Sibelius’ masterful Second Symphony, inspired by the Apennine mountains of Italy.
Three Statues
7:30PM, Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music. Her work, Teen Murti (Three Statues), takes inspiration from Hindustani singing traditions and sits aside chamber works by French composers Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc.
Us & Them
7:30PM, Saturday, August 6, 2022
2:00PM, Sunday, August 7, 2022
A ‘concerto grosso’ pits a group of soloists against a larger ensemble, moving between cooperation and contrast. Artistic advisor and baroque violinist Chloe Fedor leads a baroque ensemble in early examples of these concertos, partnered with modern takes on the genre by Errollyn Wallen and Samuel Carl Adams.
Rain & Red Clay
7:30PM, Wednesday, August 10, 2022
For many of us, the land of our ancestors holds a special power. For the Afro-British composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, that fascination drew him to the music and culture of Black America, where his forebears had been enslaved. We present his luscious Clarinet Quintet alongside two of his fundamental influences: the European tradition of composers like Brahms; and Black American music represented here by Valerie Coleman’s Red Clay and Mississippi Delta, which uses blues riffs to create a woodwind quintet with a southern accent.
Ariadne auf Naxos
7:30PM, Friday, August 12, 2022
2:00PM, Sunday, August 14, 2022
Hilarity and misadventure ensue when two productions—one a grand opera and the other a comedic farce—are forced to perform their shows simultaneously. For our annual opera production we present an enchanting masterpiece by Richard Strauss which satirizes showbusiness as it explores the widest range of musical and theatrical possibility, from monumental Greek Tragedy to irreverent Commedia dell’arte.
Santos & Haydn
7:30PM, Wednesday, August 17, 2022
The LAMF Composer Fellowship offers early-career composers the chance to present their work to our orchestra and audience. Following a new work by our inaugural composer fellow, Isaac Santos, we hear another example of a composer’s early work in Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto. These pieces are followed by Franz Joseph Haydn’s 104th and final symphony.
Ogonek & Mahler
7:30PM, Saturday, August 20, 2022
2:00PM, Sunday, August 21, 2022
Our inaugural composer-in-residence, Elizabeth Ogonek, opens this finale celebration with a grand fanfare, co-commissioned with the Boston Symphony for the Tanglewood Festival. Then, Gustav Mahler’s titanic Fifth Symphony brings the season to a triumphant close. “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace the world,” Mahler once said, and this closing concert embraces the community of artists and music lovers that make the Lakes Area Music Festival possible.
