Celebrating Festival Amadeus

The annual free picnic concert in the park celebrating the opening of Festival Amadeus will be held this year at the Riverside Park gazebo on Baker Avenue in Whitefish. The internationally acclaimed Fry Street Quartet will provide the musical entertainment for "Mingle with Mozart."

This event is free and appropriate for all ages, and will include an instrument "petting zoo," face painting and games. Fry Street Quartet will perform at 6 p.m. Patrons are welcome to bring a picnic or buy from vendors. No alcohol is allowed in the park.

Festival Amadeus is Montana’s largest classical music festival, offering a diversity of musical artists from the classical music realm. Now in its eighth season, the festival will run Aug. 2-9 in Whitefish, with three chamber concerts running concurrently in Bigfork, Aug. 4-6. Produced by Glacier Symphony and Chorale, the festival is under the creative and musical direction of John Zoltek, who has selected superb combinations of musicians for the three chamber and four orchestra concerts that offer a diverse range of classical musical  repertoire.

Fry Street Quartet is returning for its third season at Festival Amadeus, and the musicians eagerly agreed to take center stage for the free picnic concert. Comprised of Robert Waters on violin, Rebecca McFaul on violin, Bradley Ottesen on viola and Ann Francis Bayles on cello, the quartet is highly regarded for their innovative performances and technical virtuosity.

Founded in Chicago in 1997 under the mentorship of Marc Johnson, FSQ soon received rave reviews as prizewinners at the Yellow Springs Competition and the Banff International String Quartet Competition. Later the quartet traveled to Israel to participate in the International Encounters Chamber Music Seminar in 2000, where they studied with Isaac Stern. Stern then invited them to the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Workshop in New York City and subsequently arranged for the quartet's Carnegie Hall debut in 2001 where the New York Times hailed them as “a triumph of ensemble playing.”

The Quartet’s early years included a three-year “rural residency” in Hickory, North Carolina, sponsored by Chamber Music America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since then they have scored numerous prizes in such notable chamber music competitions as the Fischoff National and the Banff International String Quartet Competition. The U.S. Department of State and Carnegie Hall sponsored the quartet as cultural ambassadors to the Balkan States and on this  European tour FSQ debuted appearances in France, the Czech Republic, Austria and three visits to Brazil.

One hallmark of FSQ is their innovative ideas about classical music. The Palm Beach Daily News notes that FSQ is “Equally at home in the classic repertoire of Mozart and Beethoven or contemporary music.”  The quartet has created a series called "From Prodigy to Master," pairing early and late works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn with engaging modern compositions. Their Crossroads Project is an evocative blending of music, information, imagery and a dash of theater.

Another FSQ program highlights connections between music and Theosophy as part of a work titled "Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the Arts, 1875-1960." It includes rarely heard works from the 20th-century British composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds.

In 2002, at the invitation of Utah State University and the Caine Foundation, the Fry Street Quartet arrived in Logan to build a performance-based approach to a string program in its infancy. It has grown into a vibrant center for string performance in the Intermountain Region and the FSQ  now holds a Endowed String Quartet Residency at the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University.

In addition to the picnic concert, FSQ will perform in two chamber concerts and with the Festival Amadeus String Orchestra over the course of the week.

For more information about Festival Amadeus, visit  www.gscmusic.org or call 406-407-7000. Festival Pass and Pick 4 Passes are available for purchase online, as are single concert tickets.

Marti Kurth handles media relations for Glacier Symphony and Chorale. She can be reached at 406-407-7000 or martik@centurylink.net.