The Shenandoah Valley Music Festival looks forward to another lively concert season.
Band of Ruhks
Photos courtesy of the Shenandoah Valley Music Festival
After Jack
The Midtown Men
Piedmont Symphony Orchestra
The 2017 Shenandoah Valley Music Festival kicks off at Shrine Mont in Orkney Springs July 21, with a series of concerts held through Sept. 3 from award-winning artists, a Broadway cast, the Piedmont Symphony Orchestra and several bluegrass legends.
The SVMF, which originated in 1963 with a symphony concert in the gym of Massanutten Military Academy, is Virginia’s longest running music festival. Since the 1980s, the SVMF has included a range of genres—Americana, pop, rock, country, folk and bluegrass—but remains true to its classical roots by also hosting one of the state’s major orchestras, having partnered with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra from 1979-2015, and since 2016 with the PSO, which this year will perform two concerts celebrating the music of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (to name a few), and some of the best-loved American cinema scores. The PSO will also co-sponsor a summer strings camp in Shenandoah County Public Schools as part of the SVMF.
So how did this festival come to be? “The American Symphony Orchestra League, back in the late ’50s through the ’70s, put together a symphony orchestra for a conductor’s training workshop in Orkney Springs, at the old Orkney Springs Hotel, now part of Shrine Mont,” says Dennis Lynch, the President and Executive Director of SVMF. “The building has huge floor to ceiling windows that they would open during the workshop sessions. People used to gather outside the windows and sit on the lawn to listen. Legend has it that the Festival started when one brave soul stuck his head in the window and said, ‘Hey! Can you play one from beginning to end without stopping?’ A delightful, and, I hope, true story,” Lynch recalls.
Emmylou Harris
The SVMF has been a fixture in the Shenandoah community. Lynch notes that at least one family is on its fourth generation of attending the festival. In addition, many of the descendants of the founding committee still attend and support SVMF. But in addition to its local prominence, the event is also growing nationally. Previous lineups including such artists as Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Temptations, LeAnn Rimes and Kris Kristofferson have attracted as many as 7,000 visitors a year from at least 20 different states.
This year, the season kicks off with folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie and will see talents including 13-time GRAMMY-winner Emmylou Harris as well as the Midtown Men—the original Broadway cast of Jersey Boys. In September, the concert series ends with an event called Bluegrass Minifest, headlining 10-time International Bluegrass Awards winner Balsam Range, a band based out of Haywood County, North Carolina.
The Shenandoah Valley Music Festival runs July 21 – Sept. 3. Tickets are $10 – $37. MusicFest.org
