SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL 2025

Summer Music Festival 2025

June 3, 10, 17 and 24

Concert Begins at 7:30 p.m.

Reception Follows

Season Tickets are available for purchase online (below) or at the door.

Individual Concerts are $20 and are available for purchase at the door the night of each concert.

June 3 – Forever the Seasons. Father Ron and Friends is a New Orleans folk, blues and roots band. Drawing from the rich traditions of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and the historic sounds and tastes of South Louisiana, the band plays everything from traditional folk music to contemporary songs about the Mississippi River, Marie Laveau, the Loop Garou, and those “damned roaches!” Fronting the band on vocals and stringed instruments is Ron Clingenpeel. A solid veteran of rock, zydeco, blues, he melds the sounds for a unique flavor that comes from the heart of NOLA. Add a trained operatic voice (Barbara Smith-Davis), an avid folk-rock and blues song writer (Robert Eustis), a 60s fanatic on keys and harmonica (David Schwartz), and a long- time bass player with Motown, country, reggae R & B, and jazz background (Max Valentino), and you have a most interesting mix of talents and sounds. They will play original tunes from their new album, Forever the Seasons, released by Louisiana Red Hot Records in March 2024. www.fatherronandfriends.com

June 10  – Piper, Play! - Music for Woodwind Quintet, features the principal players of Houston’s Opera in the Heights Orchestra: flutist Wendy Isaac Bergin, oboist Joshua Bullock, clarinetist Maiko Sasaki, with Christopher Shelburne, horn, and Xayvion Davidson, bassoon. Join them for the lively and elegant Trois pièces brèves of Jacques Ibert, and the humor of English composer Malcolm Arnold’s boisterous Three Shanties, based on tunes such as “The Drunken Sailor” and “Johnny Come Down to Hilo.” They will also play an arrangement of Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, and Five Easy Dances (polka, tango, bolero, waltz, and rumba) by Hungarian-American composer Denes Agay. Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s celebrated wind quintet finishes the program, a warm and genial piece that ends with a set of variations on “My Jesus, make my heart to love thee,” an original hymn tune by Nielsen himself. 

June 17 – Istanpitta Early Music Ensemble. Join multi-instrumentalist Albert Cofrin, the director and founder of Istanpitta, and Colombian soprano Camila Parias for an evening of ancient songs and dance music from across the European continent and the Middle East. Accompanied with lutes, vielle (fiddle), bagpipes, and medieval percussion, these songs about love, the Virgin Mary, and nature would have been performed by jongleurs and troubadours in the royal courts during the 13th-15th centuries in England, France, Spain and Italy. Camila is a soprano soloist with the Boston Camerata and a core member of the Choir of the Church of the Advent in Boston. Albert earned a BA in Jazz Theory & Composition, but he also has an Aerospace Engineering degree. He is currently a Mission Flight Controller for NASA’s International Space Station.

June 24 – Hermits and Herding Girls: Music of Love and Longing.  Soprano and Louisiana native Laurie Robertson Øgaard and her husband, organist/pianist and native Norwegian Sigurd Melvær Øgaard, will perform The Hermit Songs by American composer Samuel Barber, one of the great song cycles in American music. The texts are translated by various authors from medieval Irish poetry. Sigurd will put the organ through its paces with Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564. The free-form Toccata includes an extended pedal solo; it is followed by a tuneful, quiet Adagio and ends with a lilting, joyous four-part fugue. The Øgaards, now residing in Bergen, Norway, will also include pieces by two Norwegian composers: Ole Bull’s The Herdgirl’s Sunday, arranged for organ, and Edvard Grieg’s song cycle Haugtussa (The Mountain Maid) about a young girl’s first love and loss.

A graduate of McNeese and the University of Houston, Laurie now sings in the Bergen Cathedral Choir and has performed as a soprano soloist in America and Europe. Sigurd, a graduate of the Grieg Academy and Texas Tech University, was an organ scholar in England, and held organist positions at Palmer Episcopal and Christ Church Cathedral in Houston. Since 2015, he has been the organist of Bergen Cathedral.