Upcoming Events at Steamboat Strings In The Mountain's Music Festival

The Steamboat Strings In The Mountains Music Festival is officially underway, after a opening fabulous weekend filled with performanaces by the Strings Orchestra and Four Bitchin' Babes. Check-out some of the upcoming Strings events. Don't forget! Book your Steamboat Springs summer vacation with ResortQuest and you can get free nights and up to $100 in free spending money - which can be used towards Strings tickets!

The Neville Brothers

The Neville Brothers perform at 8 p.m. on Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3 in the Strings Music Pavilion. Reserved seating tickets are $75, and are available at Strings Music Festival (970-879-5056 x105, http://www.stringsinthemountains.com/ or the box office)

The Neville Brothers have honed a style that is soul and jazz and blues all wrapped into one legendary sound. Raised in New Orleans’ Thirteenth Ward, these four brothers reign as the Crescent City’s first family of funk. Together, they are what Billboard calls “a sound and energy that has come not only to reflect that of the city, but also define it.”

For two nights right before Fourth of July, expect fireworks to fly onstage at the Strings Music Festival as the Neville Brothers perform in what is arguably the festival’s biggest production to date. Their solo projects have astounded fans and critics for decades – but as a family, the Neville Brothers create what has been called “the funkiest sounds this world has ever heard.” Hurricane Katrina brought the brothers into the limelight in another way, as they’ve devoted months to benefit concerts for their devastated hometown: “My profile and the profiles of my brothers have been raised by the storm. People all over the world see us as the face of New Orleans. They want to hear us play. They want to feel that we've survived the storm. They want to be assured that life goes on,” says Aaron.

“The Neville Brothers are not just local heroes. They're an institution. They've been the closing act on the biggest stage at Jazz Fest for as long as I can remember,” said Scott Aiges, program director for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation which puts on that city’s iconic music festival every spring. “What kind of impact did Bob Marley have on Jamaica?” he asks. “(The Neville Brothers) are kind of like that.”

Leahy: Neo-Celtic Superstars

Leahy performs at 8 p.m. on Friday, July 10, in the Strings Music Pavilion. Reserved seating tickets are $55, and are available at Strings Music Festival (970-879-5056 x105, http://www.stringsinthemountains.com/ or the box office).

“(Leahy’s) approach seems so gloriously free of commercial pollution … this is an act whose music is invigorating,” says Los Angeles Times. While their roots are Irish and Scottish, Leahy’s musical range spans from near-symphony to lightning-fast fiddling and ballads with penetrating vocal harmony. Their albums have been called a mixture of rock, pop, Celtic, classical, folk, country and traditional dance music – an ideal melting pot in the genre known as World. Some of their music is written collaboratively; other times it’s the product of a single Leahy sibling. But it’s all finished off with a group vibe at The Farm, their home studio in Lakefield.

“Their live performance makes Riverdance look like Lawrence Welk re-runs,” says Time Out New York.

Summer Classical Series

Strings Music Festival continues its Summer Classical Series with concerts on Wednesday, July 1, Wednesday, July 8, and Saturday, July 11.

Wednesday evening concerts have taken on a new format this summer. These concerts feature 90 minutes of excellent music with no intermission and an informal reception after the concert to meet the evening’s performers.

Beginning this new format on July 1 is a concert featuring Chee-Yun, violin, Mary Bonhag, soprano, Wendy Chen, piano, Evan Premo, bass, and Todd Reid, drums. They will be performing pieces of Beethoven, Bach, Bernstein and Bolling. Also featured is a piece composed by Mr. Premo, as well as Chee-Yun playing electric violin on Schoenfield’s Who Let the Cat Out Last Night? and Polonaise Brillante in D Major, Op. 4 by Henryk Wieniawski.

The second Wednesday classical concert of the season is on July 8, featuring new Strings Music Director Andrés Cárdenes, violin, Arturo Delmoni, violin and viola, Aloysia Friedmann, viola, David Hardy, cello, Jon Kimura Parker, piano, and Jason Vieaux, guitar. They will be performing pieces by Spanish and Italian composers, including Gaetano Pugnani, Francisco Tarrega, Isaac Albeniz, and Paganini, as well as Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 1.

Saturday, July 11 is the second Strings Festival Orchestra performance of the summer season. Featured is piano soloist Jon Kimura Parker performing Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Orchestra. The other pieces performed are Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano, based on the paintings of Botticelli and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, K. 364, featuring conductor Andrés Cárdenes on violin and Arturo Delmoni on Viola.