Valley of the Moon Music Festival Announces 2021 Season

Valley of the Moon Music Festival (VMMF) brings the captivating sound of period instruments to the world of Classical and Romantic chamber music for its 2021 season, Love and Longing: Reaching Across the Distance. A series of nine curated programs inspired by the fundamental human desire to connect, the Festival brings together artists and audiences across digital platforms and modified in-person live performances, July 17 - August 1, 2021, with a special preview concert on June 24.

RSVP is required and is now open for all virtual events. A limited number of tickets for the live, outdoor, socially-distanced concerts in Sonoma County will be available for purchase on or around May 1, 2021. Please visit https://valleyofthemoonmusicfestival.org/ to make a seating reservation.

Virtual concert subscriptions are available for a $35 reservation fee + $135 suggested donation, which includes 8 festival concerts, the free festival preview concert, and the free Love Letter Mini Concert (all virtual). Single virtual concert reservations are available for a $5 reservation fee + $20 suggestion donation.

Each Festival program tells a larger story of separation, longing, and coming together through the chamber music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Dvořák, and more. From Clara Schumann to the American composer Harry Burleigh, art songs, inspired by their magnificent poetry, serve as another vehicle for expressing the Festival's theme.

Joining VMMF founders Eric Zivian and Tanya Tomkins, performing on fortepiano and cello, is a roster of world-renowned musicians including violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, baritone Dashon Burton, violist Jodi Levitz, contralto Emily Marvosh, tenor Kyle Stegall, violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, and violinist Rachel Barton Pine, back by popular demand. VMMF also welcomes to the Festival its 2021 Apprentices: Kako Miura and Vivian Mayers, violin, Ramón Carrero-Martínez, viola, Drake Driscoll, cello, and Suren Barry, fortepiano. The Apprenticeship Program, a two-week, full-scholarship summer residential program for emerging professional musicians, is a key part of VMMF.

VMMF artists will perform all the music on instruments that match the period when the music was composed: gut strings rather than steel strings for the string players, and four different period pianos. The earliest and smallest fortepiano, perfect for the music of Mozart, is a copy of a Dulcken (Vienna, 1795), built in the 1980s in Berkeley by Paul Poletti and Janine Johnson. The early Romantic repertoire will be performed with an original Viennese fortepiano from 1841 by Franz Rausch, and the later songs by Debussy and others, as well as Fauré's Piano Quartet, will be performed on a Chickering piano from the 1890s, courtesy of the UC Berkeley Music Department. Finally, for the early 20th-century American program, VMMF will feature a 1901 Knabe.

Complementing the Festival's main musical programs, VMMF's Blattner Lecture Series will feature dynamic speakers who will give historic and social context of the music. Kate van Orden, Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University, will host the culminating lecture, "Conversations with Kate." The complete lecture series will be announced at a later date.

"The 2021 Valley of the Moon Music Festival echoes a major theme of the pandemic period - our collective desire to reconnect and emerge from social isolation," said VMMF founder Tanya Tomkins. "In this spirit, we have curated a season of incredible music that expresses our universal need for closeness, performed by VMMF artists both near and far, allowing us to celebrate our togetherness despite the distance between us. In addition to virtual offerings, we are delighted to offer safe opportunities to experience the joy of live performance."

"This year we acknowledge the present by looking to the past," said VMMF founder Eric Zivian. "The expressions of love and longing in Classical and Romantic songs and chamber music are more relevant than ever. Thanks to the passion and perseverance of our patrons and artists, we're able to connect with audiences through timeless music."

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