Since its founding 25 years ago, Music in the Vineyards has brought chamber music to wineries throughout the Napa Valley. This season will open tonight with a special concert at The Disney Family Museum, before returning northward. Artistic directors and founders Michael Adams and Daria Tedeschi Adams say they’ve been holding back special repertoire they wanted to save for this anniversary year.
There’s much more information about the festival at the Music in the Vineyards website.
Daria Adams says: “When we started, we had three weeks of one program per week, and we didn’t ever expect to have anything more, we just thought ‘this is great!’ It’s just grown and grown and grown until now we have four weeks with four programs per week.” They knew from the start that it wouldn’t be just the same roster of players returning each year. “So that there would always be fresh voices, fresh musicians coming. And that has been, I think, a big part of how we’ve grown.” This year, they’ll have three quartets in residence, the Pacifica, Dover, and Tesla Quartets, in addition to their second-ever apprentice quartet, from Indiana University, the Second String Quartet. They’ll have a chance to play in various configurations, and with other guest artists during the four weeks of the festival. The 25 for 25 repertoire they’ll be playing includes classics by Dvorak, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Haydn, even Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. “We’ve actually been saving pieces that we knew we wanted to perform this year, so we didn’t do them the last two or three years. And so it was 25 of what we considered to be gems of the chamber music repertoire.” Each concert will have at least one of the works, and as many as three. The festival runs through the 25th of August.
