Bear Valley Music Festival Finale

The weather is cooperating well for the big final weekend of the Bear Valley Music Festival under the big white tent at Bear Valley Resort off Highway 4 above Big Trees.

The array of music genres and themes is colorful and uber-audience-friendly and tickets are available on the festival website as well as at the door for last-minute concert ticket buyers.

Thursday, August 1 features an imaginative pops program of sorts Maestro Alexander Mickeltwate dubbed “From Oklahoma to California”; stringing a series of colorful pieces into a whimsical road trip paying tribute to the state where he lives and works most of the year as the musical director for the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and The Golden State, where he journeys to and now enjoys spending the summer festival season.

The audience will hear the sounds of “Oklahoma”; Michael Daughterty’s “Route 66”; a trippy electric violin concerto by John Adams called “Dharma at Big Sur”; Hollywood movie music from “The Hours” by Phillip Glass; and “Dead Symphony No. 6,” an orchestral tribute by Lee Johnson to, yes, the Grateful Dead.

Festival concert goers experienced another equally imaginative program last Saturday evening as Mickelthwate rolled out his “Our Earth, Our Stars and Beyond” program, featuring orchestral and choral music along with a super cool electric guitar performance of Jimmy Page’s “Stairway to Heaven” by virtuoso guitarist Scott Moughton, a Murphys resident, who also happens to be the festival’s sound engineer and a member of the locally notable rock cover band the Star Dogs (see accompanying photo).

The program led off with music from two contemporary indigenous composers set to a narration by Susan Randolf, a local artist with indigenous roots. After an intermission, the audience was treated to a tremendously moving, celestially-inspired symphonic work called “Deep Field” by Grammy award-winning composer Eric Whitacre, which gave a sense of sound, space and meaning to the iconic photo of the same name taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image, captured over an 11-day period, captured the world’s imagination, depicting for us 3,000 never seen before galaxies; each containing hundreds of billions of stars.

Mickelthwate encouraged the audience to download an app that played a spacey chorale accompaniment to expand upon that of the most impressive Sonora Community Choir (aka the Columbia College Community Choir), led by Dr. Daryl Hollinger. The choir also performed Faure’s requiem as a vehicle to further transport the audience along the maestro’s envisioned musical journey from the heavens into paradise.

Also this weekend

This Friday night, internationally renowned violinist Bella Hristova will be the featured soloist for what the maestro is billing as Friday’s Blockbuster concert, featuring Prokofiev’s 2nd violin concerto, known for being virtuosic; paired with Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No. 5.

Saturday’s “Havana Nights” is a party night for gala fans. Besides being one of the music festival’s key fundraising events, it’s an evening of Cuban-themed music, food and drink with a live auction and dancing. Dressing in theme is encouraged.

Sunday afternoon, the festival concludes with a “Romantic Voices” showcasing vocal performances by soprano Carrie Hennessey and tenor Salvatore Atti singing songs most loved and recorded by Andrea Bocelli. Among them will be works by Verdi, Puccini, and Schubert; also modern pieces like “Never Enough” from “The Greatest Showman”, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Moon River.”

While several programs feature traditional and contemporary classical music, the opening nights of the festival showcased some of the nation’s top tribute bands. This year, those groups were Skynnyn Lynnyrd (playing the music of Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd); Robert Bartko’s George Michael Reborn (who sings and dances like the iconic performer did back in the ‘80s and ‘90s); and Garrett Wilkins and the Parrotheads (recreating the music of Jimmy Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band).

There was also a disco night with singers and dancers out of New York City performing tuneage from the Saturday NIght Fever days with the Festival Orchestra as their back up band and audience members also boogieing on the dance floor, many who channeled the era by showing up in looks inspired from those dance floor days. The virtuoso duo Tuck & Patti with their genre-bending music opened this year’s festival.

Tickets are available to the remaining shows at the door or online at bearvalleymusic.org.