performers
Festival Orchestra Napa
Festival Orchestra Napa is an all-star ensemble that brings together principal players from major international orchestras and faculty from renowned colleges and conservatories, together with participants from the Festival's Blackburn Music Academy. Centered around a core of Frost School of Music faculty, the orchestra also includes hand-picked musicians from ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, MET Opera Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Houston Symphony, and Atlanta Symphony, among others.
Festival Orchestra Napa’s appearance is made possible through a generous gift from Tatiana and Gerret Copeland, proprietors of Bouchaine Vineyards
Performances
The 16th Season of Festival Napa Valley opens with Carlo Ponti conducting Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture performed by Festival Orchestra Napa. Sophia Bacelar performs movements from Daniel Brewbaker’s cello concerto La Serenissima. The evening concludes with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World.”
Maestra Michelle Di Russo leads Festival Orchestra Napa in Dave and Chris Brubeck's exhilarating ode to the famed American landscape photographer and environmentalist. Incorporating over 100 Ansel Adams photographs, this multimedia program concludes with a performance by the dynamic Brubeck Brothers Quartet.
Festival Napa Valley commemorates composer Tchaikovsky’s first and only visit to America to inaugurate Carnegie Hall in 1891. Constantine Orbelian, recently named Music Director of New York City Opera, conducts Festival Orchestra Napa in Tchaikovsky’s dazzling Violin Concerto, with soloist Tessa Lark, and the famous Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Dmitry Masleev.
The exhilarating soprano Andriana Chuchman returns to Festival Napa Valley to headline L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s 1832 comic masterpiece, with an outstanding cast that also includes tenor Mario Chang as the lovestruck peasant Nemorino, soprano Mikayla Sager as Adina’s friend Giannetta, with singers from the Festival’s Manetti Shrem Summer Conservatory. Directed by Jean-Romain Vesperini with Gemma New conducting.
Festival Napa Valley closes its 16th Season with a concert featuring two beloved masterworks: Copland’s quintessentially American ballet score Rodeo and Rimsky-Korsakov’s evocative orchestral suite Scheherazade, sharing the bill with Blue Fire by the late great American composer Daniel Brewbaker. Michelle Di Russo leads Festival Orchestra Napa.