“Wine, Women and Song”
SATURDAY, AUGUST 6th at 7:30 PM
Riverwalk Center, Breckenridge, Colorado

The Breckenridge Music Festival (BMF) presents the Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra and Vocalists in this Saturday’s “Wine, Women and Song – music of Vienna” concert featuring Soprano Jacqueline Culpepper, Mezzo Soprano Soon Cho, Tenor Bradley Howard and Bass-Baritone Daniel Boye. The concert will feature music from Lehar’s The Merry Widow operetta, and songs, waltzes and polkas from the famous Viennese masters, Johann Strauss and Johann Strauss Jr.

For more than half a century, Johann Strauss served as a purveyor par excellence of dance music for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  He as well as his brothers Josef and Eduard turned out a seemingly endless supply of waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, mazurkas, marches, and the like that kept the Viennese dancing. In view of his tremendous success as a composer of dance music, it is somewhat surprising that Strauss would take a chance on the vicissitudes of the theater and try his hand at operetta. The Opera, Die Fledermaus was first performed in Vienna in 1874. Filled with intrigues, mistaken identities, inconvenient liaisons, and slightly risqué situations, Die Fledermaus is a riot of frothy tunes.  The overture to Die Fledermaus is a continuous string of tunes taken from the opera and has been noted as “the pièce de résistance of the third Strauss operetta.”

At a young age, Johann Strauss Jr. (Strauss senior’s son) ignored his father’s wishes and formed his own orchestra, and is now considered the most famous of the Strausses. In the 55 years of his musical career, his output was prolific – he wrote over 550 works. As well as waltzes, polkas, quadrilles and other dance music, he wrote marches, and, for the stage, he composed fifteen operettas, one opera and an unfinished ballet. Unfortunately, despite composing all this dance music, he always maintained that he himself was unable to dance. Tonight’s concert will feature Strauss Jr.’s Thunder and Lightening Polka, a piece composed to imitate the thunderous crashes and images of lightening.

Guest vocalists include returning Festival favorites soprano Jacqueline Culpepper and bass-baritone Daniel Boye. Joining them will be lyric mezzo-soprano Soon Cho, hailed by the Cincinnati Post as “…regal in bearing, with vocal endowments to match…,” and tenor Bradley Howard, whose career spans the classical and contemporary in choral works, solo recitals and operatic roles.
Please join the members of Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra and Vocalists as they present a night of music from Vienna at the Riverwalk Center on Tuesday, August 6th at 7:30 pm. For tickets ($25, $30, $35 Adults, $10 students, $7 juniors) call 970.547.3100 or log onto www.breckenridgemusicfestival.com.