Preview: ‘Sunriver Music Festival brings classical music to Central Oregon’
Brett Mitchell leads the Sunriver Music Festival Orchestra at the Sunriver Resort Great Hall. (Photo by David Young-Wolff)
BEND, Ore. — The Bulletin has published a preview of the Sunriver Music Festival’s 2026 season, the fifth under Artistic Director & Conductor Brett Mitchell:
In their earliest conversations about programming a series around America’s 250th birthday, conductor Brett Mitchell and the rest of the Sunriver Music Festival team faced a problem: Should they do it in August 2025, 11 months ahead of July 2026, or this August, a month after what could be the peak of patriotic feelings?
The SRMF team opted for the latter, which means the 49th season of the annual classical musical festival, set to begin Monday, will feature American composers, as well, of course, as a bevy of legends including Beethoven and Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn, through Aug. 20.
“What I really wanted to do with, and what I’m always trying to do, is to have these programs be a real conversation between the greatest masterworks of yesterday and the most promising voices of today and tomorrow. And in this particular case, because it’s America’s 250th birthday, I really wanted to make sure that we were having a representation of the totality of America,” Mitchell said.
That die will be cast from the first piece he leads the professional Sunriver Festival Orchestra through: “Made in America,” by Grammy-winning composer Joan Tower, during Classical Concert I at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Sunriver Resort Great Hall. From there, each of the concerts in the annual classical music festival will open with a work by an American composer.
“We will open our 2nd concert with a piece by a gentleman who was known as the dean of African-American composers,” Mitchell said, referring to William Grant Still and his “Darker America,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 12.
“We are really trying to hear from a multiplicity of voices because, look, programs, symphonic programs, are little tiny Americas. They’re little tiny melting pots, right?” said Mitchell. “And it’s like, these are the three ingredients that go into this little melting pot for this concert. So the melting pot of the first concert is Joan Tower’s ‘Made in America,’ Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, and Haydn’s 101st Piano Concerto. The melting pot of the next one is a little bit different. But the idea that all of these programs, hopefully, when taken together, will demonstrate to our audience this idea that one, classical music is not a thing that happened. It is a thing that is happening.”
Family Concert
It is happening in Sunriver and Bend, where the series moves for its final concerts — but not until after the annual Family Concert returns Friday, Aug. 14, a matinee event at SHARC with a pre-concert opportunity to “meet the instruments” followed by what is quite possibly the best concert title ever, “Harry Potter & the Instruments of the Orchestra,” featuring music by John Williams.
“It’s such an unusual, interesting thing that he chose to do,” Mitchell said of Williams’ note at the beginning of his score, which reads in part: “When I wrote the full orchestral score for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, I hadn’t planned to write the eight miniatures presented here. The film score did not require them, and our production schedule, usually very difficult in the film world, made no provision for their arrival. However, if I can be permitted to put it a bit colorfully, each piece seemed to insist on being hatched out of the larger body of the full score.”
“So what John does is he takes eight little miniatures, eight different themes, and gives them to the whole orchestra, but to specific sections,” Mitchell said. “So like the second movement is the ‘Theme for Hogwarts,’ right? … And the theme is played by four French horns so that the kids in the audience can hear the sound of French horns. … What about the bad guy? What about Voldemort? He’s played by a trio of bassoons.”
And what about Harry’s magical broomstick, the Nimbus 2000? Played by the woodwinds, of course.
“It’s a great way to play music that the kids will know from a story they will know (and) to show them the colors of the orchestra while we’re doing it,” Mitchell continued. “So they’re getting all of this information without even knowing that they’re getting it. So I’m really, really tickled that we’re going to be able to do this piece for the kids because I know they’re absolutely going to just fall in love with it.”
Pops Concert
The following evening, it’s on to Bend for the remaining concerts, starting with the ever-popular Pops Concert, Saturday, Aug. 15, at the Tower Theatre. Titled, “John Williams and the American Journey,” highlights include music from “Saving Private Ryan,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” some patriotic tunes and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
Mitchell said, “We start with John’s arrangement of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ And then we really begin the program with The Revolutionary War. So some of John’s music for ‘The Patriot,’ and then this wonderful piece for a violin and orchestra called ‘Souvenir from America, Yankee Doodle Variations’ by a French composer. And so that’s The Revolutionary War. Then we go to the Civil War. We’ll do some of John Williams’s music from ‘Lincoln.'”
Said Meagan Iverson, SRMF’s executive director, “Brett is such an aficionado of film music and John Williams, and the way he has been able to create this program that blends a lot of film music, and also beloved patriotic pieces, is going to make for such an incredible concert.”
Iverson also warned that tickets to the Pops Concert, along with Monday’s opening night concert in Sunriver, are selling fast.
“All of the concerts are selling pretty well,” she said. “Those are the two that if people don’t hop on it, we might have to say, ‘Oh, we’ll put you on the wait list.”
The final two classical music concerts are Aug. 18 and 20, also at the Tower Theatre.
While you’ll need a ticket to attend all of the abovementioned concerts, Iverson notes that there are a number of rehearsals that are free and open to the public. The open rehearsal schedule, as well as ticketing, more events and other information, is at sunrivermusic.org.
Some concerts have only one rehearsal, which would not happen if the Festival Orchestra was not made up of professionals who come ready to play, Iverson added.
“We have been realizing that (open rehearsal) is a very extra special offering, as it’s becoming less and less common to have so many opportunities for people, to just get a taste of what’s happening behind the scenes,” Iverson said, “and hopefully be inspired then to come to the full concert.”
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