Festival Amadeus back for 5th year
A week-long celebration of classical music will take Whitefish by storm this month.
Festival Amadeus is back for its fifth year July 22 through 28. The event, put on by Glacier Symphony and Chorale, features performances and events every evening and camps and lessons during the day for local musicians.
The festival kicks off July 22 with a free concert in Depot Park. The Festival Amadeus Orchestra will perform works by Beethoven, Dvorak, Dreisler, Rossini, Saint-Saens and Mozart, and guest violinist Tim Fain will play. Gates open at 6 p.m. for the 7:30 p.m. concert.
Bring lawn chairs or blankets to sit on. Food, wine and beer will be available for purchase.
The main event July 23 is “Virtuoso Violins and Vino,” a wine tasting and auction at the O’Shaughnessy Center. Wines from “Mozart’s Cellar,” featuring select wines from Austria and Italy, will be featured, and attendees will be able to purchases cases of wine, with a portion donated back to Glacier Symphony and Chorale.
The silent auction will feature 11 original works of violin art created by local artists in support of the symphony. Written bids will be accepted until noon July 23; those bids will be entered as the starting silent bid at the event that evening. To view the violins, visit www.gscmusic.org/virtuoso_violins.
Doors open at 7 p.m. Silent auction bidding will close at 8:30 p.m., with a live auction immediately following. Tickets to the event are $25 each, or $10 with the purchase of a festival pass.
The music continues July 24 with the festival’s first chamber night, “Magnificent Duo,” at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. and will feature Fain, the violinist, with Paul Coletti on viola and April Lane on piano performing everything from Mozart to Philip Glass.
The second chamber night performance is “Cello Piano Fantasy,” which starts at 7:30 p.m. July 25 in the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. Cellist Amit Peled and pianist Alon Goldstein will present a program focused on those instruments, and clarinet player Dinah Weimer will join them for Beethoven’s “Clarinet Trio in B flat Major.”
“Serenade for Soloists,” featuring Coletti, Fain and the Festival Amadeus Strings, starts at 7:30 p.m. July 26 in the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. The program will include music by Bach, Telemann, Mozart and Vivaldi, as well as “Planets,” a concerto for solo viola and chamber ensemble composed and performed by Coletti.
The July 27 performance includes Peled performing Shostakovich’s “Cello Concerto No. 1.” It will be followed by Haydn’s deeply lyrical “Drum Roll” symphony. Overtures by Mozart and Haydn, performed by the Festival Amadeus Orchestra, will open the program. The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center.
The festival finale concert, “Beethoven and Mozart’s ‘Haffner,’” starts at 7:30 p.m. July 28, at the Whitefish Performing Arts Center. Mozart’s popular “Symphony No. 35 in D” opens the show, followed by Goldstein’s interpretation of Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat Major.”
Weimer, the clarinetist, will be the soloist for the premier of “Concerto Rustica,” which was composed by Glacier Symphony music director John Zoltek. The concerto is written in a Romantic-Modernist style.
The program will close with the final movement of Mendelssohn’s “G Minor Piano Concerto.”
Full passes to Festival Amadeus, as well as the popular “Pick 4” pass, are now available to purchase online at gscmusic.org or by calling the Glacier Symphony and Chorale office at 257-3241.
All passes are transferable. Single tickets for each concert are also available to purchase online.