Kirstin "Fluffy" Blake was the production manager for the Minnesota Beethoven Festival from it's founding in 2007 until her passing from cancer shortly after the 2017 Festival. She had a broad career that took her from lighting design, to working opera productions at Brevard, to running spotlights for Oprah [...]
Over the years numerous MBF artists have become friends of the Festival, returning two or more times. We have enjoyed Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra performing the complete symphonies of Beethoven, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra delighted audiences for six seasons performing repertoire for as few as sixteen players [...]
This year we are excited to present something quite different from our normal offerings by featuring Olivier Latry, the titular organist from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris! He has chosen a wonderful and diverse program that includes a work by Beethoven written for mechanical organ, an instrument [...]
Winona is just far enough from MSP (Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport) that it occasionally leads to some interesting (i.e. challenging) travel situations. While I do my best to alert and remind managers/artists that Winona is 114 miles from MSP, sometimes this bit of knowledge slips by and departing flights [...]
I just returned from China where I spent the past 10 days listening to a lot of piano music – and I do mean a lot. I make this trip several times per year in my role as Director of the GMT (Graded Music Test) and on this occasion [...]
From the perspective of an audience member, it is easy to see (literally) that all concerts have certain staging requirements. For example, if an orchestra is featured, a plot map lays out the placement of podium/chairs/stands/risers, and if the concert is to feature piano, then of course a piano [...]
This is my all-time favorite photo ever taken at the Minnesota Beethoven Festival. Some of you may remember this moment during a pre-concert talk given before one of the Festival Chorale concerts. On the left is choral legend Dale Warland, center is Brian Newhouse of Minnesota Public Radio, and [...]
People are always asking me how we move our grand piano, and more specifically, how we get it through a door. More often than not, there is an assumption that the door itself is somehow manipulated. Comments are made or questions posed about removing the door or door frame, [...]
This summer we are looking forward to having with us the 2017 Van Cliburn Gold Medalist, Yekwon Sunwoo. Over the years we have featured several other Cliburn winners as well including Vadym Kholodenko, Nobuyuki Tsujii and just this past summer, Minnesota native, Kenny Broberg. In 2013 I watched much [...]
Greetings to our MBF community! With this first post, I am delighted to announce the launch of the Minnesota Beethoven Festival Blog dedicated and devoted to all things MBF - our artists, our people and our community. It is my hope that you will find this space informative, helpful, [...]
