Grammy Winners featured at Bravo! Big Sky concert series

ARTS COUNCIL OF BIG SKY

BIG SKY – The Arts Council of Big Sky is pleased to present the 10^th annual Bravo! Big Sky Music Festival in the Big Sky Town Center on Aug. 13-14. The festival, formerly called the Big Sky Classical Music Festival, brings some of the best classical and crossover musicians to Big Sky for two nights of world-class performances.

The festival kicks off with a ticketed concert at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center on Friday, Aug. 13, with an intimate concert from Angella Ahn and Friends. This all-star string ensemble will perform the famous Mendelssohn Octet, along with pieces from Kenji Bunch and Caroline Shaw. The group features the following musicians Angella Ahn (violin), Eugena Chang (cello), Britton Riley (cello), Grammy-winner Yvonne Lam (viola), Carrie Krause (violin), Pico Alt (violin), Chi-Chi Lin Bestmann (viola), and Emilie-Anne Gendron (violin). Tickets for this show are now on sale and can be purchased at warrenmillerpac.org.

“This is a world-class group of musicians that were assembled just for this concert,” said Brian Hurlbut, ACBS executive director. “They will be playing an intimate concert at the WMPAC and then joining the orchestra on Saturday. We’re thrilled to have them.

On Saturday there will be a free concert in Len Hill Park in the Big Sky Town Center. First up will be a performance from the Big Sky Festival String Orchestra, playing pieces from Mozart, LeClair, Kilar, Walker and Grieg, with guest soloist Angella Ahn. The orchestra will once again be conducted by Peter Bay, who is the Music Director and Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Bay has appeared with over 80 different orchestras all over the world. In 1994, he was one of two conductors selected to participate in the Leonard Bernstein American Conductors Program. He was the first prize winner of the 1980 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Young Conductors Competition and a prize winner of the 1987 Leopold Stokowski Competition sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra. He was inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame in May 2016.

Closing the Saturday performance will be FUTUREMAN/SILVERMAN, a wide-ranging musical conversation between two of the world’s most eclectic and adventurous musicians. Roy “Futureman” Wooten is a five-time Grammy-winning percussionist, founding member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, a composer, inventor, innovator, and a wildly engaging personality. His musical explorations continue to mine the furthest reaches of the musical world. Dubbed “the greatest living exponent of the electric violin” by the BBC, Tracy Silverman is the world’s foremost concert electric violinist.

He went to The Juilliard School hoping to become the next Jascha Heifetz but left wanting to become the next Jimi Hendrix, and was recently designated by Juilliard as one of its Top 100 graduates. His groundbreaking work with the electric 6-string violin has led to collaborations with the world’s greatest composers and premiers at Carnegie Hall. The combination of the two is explosive. Utilizing electronics, live looping, and spontaneous musical interaction, they create soundscapes and grooves that will make you look for the other members of this duo. The journey spans rock, jazz, Latin and Asian grooves and includes “de-rangements” of electric violin concertos, original works, and celebrates everything from Bach to Hendrix.

“This is the tenth anniversary of the festival,” said Hurlbut, “and we think we have a great lineup that will appeal to everyone.”

For more information about the festival please visit bigskyarts.org.