The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Want to hear great live music during your summer travels and vacations? Here are links to the Minnesota Beethoven Festival in Winona; and to the Green Lake Festival and Door County’s Peninsula Music Festival in Wisconsin. Also, Wisconsin Public Radio starts weekly broadcasts of concerts by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra this afternoon at 2 p.m.

TWO REMINDERS: The 14th Madison Early Music Festival, with the theme “Renaissance Germany,”   tonight features a performance by the viola consort Parthenia (below) at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall on the UW-Madison campus. It will be preceded at 6:30 p.m. by a FREE lecture by Madison Symphony Orchestra trombonist and program note writer as well as UW-Whitewater music professor J. Michael Allsen on “More Than a ‘Theater of Instruments’: The Syntagma Musicum of Michael Praetorius.”  The FREE and public lecture is in basement Room L-160 of the Elvehjem Building of the nearby Chazen Museum of Art. For more information, visit: http://continuingstudies.wisc.edu/lsa/memf/index.html

ALSO: Wisconsin Public Radio recently announced programming changes. One of them is that WPR will begin broadcasting concerts by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra today and every Sunday at 2 p.m. The MSO has always been terrific, but its current music director Edo de Waart (below) has taken the orchestra to new heights. In the Madison area, tune in to WERN 88.7 FM.

By Jacob Stockinger

It is high summer and that means traveling and festivals.

Should you be on the way from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Twin Cities, or vice-versa, you might want to take in something at the seventh Minnesota Beethoven Festival (below), which got started with a free concert by the Empire Brass on July 4 and runs through July 23.

Others artists in the impressive lineup include the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, pianists Garrick Ohlsson and Mischa Dichter; the American String Quartet, the Shanghai String Quartet and the Ariel String Quartet; guitarist Sharon Isbin; the Russian National Orchestra; and Dale Warland and the Festival Chorale.

Here is a link, with information about artist, tickets, concerts and background, to the seventh Minnesota Beethoven Festival under the direction of pianist Ned Kirk:

http://www.mnbeethovenfestival.org/2013-festival-schedule/

Also the Green Lake Festival in Green Lake, Wisconsin is fully under way and runs until Aug. 31. Here is a link to concert and events:

http://www.greenlakefestival.org

Then there are festivals in Door County including the 61^st Peninsula Music Festival, under the direction of conductor Victor Yampolsky (below) and featuring a lot of great orchestral programs, which gets started on Aug. 6 with Beethoven’s  famed Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” (the irresistibly dramatic opening is in a YouTube video at the bottom with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra) and “Creatures of Prometheus” Overture (which shares a theme with the Eroica) and Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

A lot of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Shostakovich will also be featured on the programs. Take a look.

Here is a link:

http://www.musicfestival.com/newsite/