Lenny on the (red) rocks: Bernstein's daughter, friends are coming to Utah to celebrate composer's 100th birthday...
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August 2018
Far-Flung Pianos: Distant Steinways Tell Diverse Stories
Piano Care on a Rugged Trail: At the Moab Music Festival, located at the gateway to Utah’s Arches and Canyonlands national parks, three chamber music concerts are held each summer in a red-rock grotto on the banks of the Colorado River. Before each performance, a Steinway Model B is transported to the secret location by jet boat. Operations Director Dave Montgomery says that the move starts before dawn, when a team of six to nine workers load the tightly-wrapped instrument onto the boat from a launch site forty-five minutes upstream.
August 2018
The Moab Music Festival is a Feast for the Senses
I turn down a dirt road off Highway 128, the serpentine Scenic Byway along the Colorado River that ends in Moab, Utah. Eroded red sandstone cliffs jut out of the landscape; a rock formation known as the Priest and Nuns looms on the right. It’s the kind of road I’ve traveled for years here on my way to mountain-biking trails. Fifteen minutes later, I’m standing on a shaded patio, sipping a glass of rosé and chatting with virtuoso jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, the evening’s performer, and Jamie Bernstein (daughter of Leonard)...
July 2018
No mountain-town summer is complete without live music. While concert series abound in Park City, you need to venture just a short distance to partake in Utah’s summer festival scene. Here are a few nearby music festivals to add to your summertime calendar.
February 2018
Coachella. Bonnaroo. Lollapalooza. These music festivals are legendary, but if you’ve already been there and done that—or if you need even more live music in your life—why not add a few less famous festivals to your must-visit list?... It’s hard to find a more spectacular location to take in a concert than the red-rock canyons of Moab.
January 2018
Where will the sounds of music take travelers in 2018? The destination may depend on your favorite song, but whether that means jazz, Afropunk, rock or another rhythm entirely, there’s definitely a place to go.
September 2017
Moab Music Festival celebrates a century of Leonard Bernstein: As the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth approaches in August 2018, Michael Barrett is doing what he can to keep the great American composer-conductor-pianist’s memory alive.
“It’s bittersweet for me. There’s a whole generation that has grown up in his absence,” said Barrett, who was Bernstein’s assistant and rehearsal pianist for seven years, up until the legendary maestro‘s death in 1990, and has been a musical adviser to the Bernstein family since then. “People kind of forget who he was,” Barrett said. “A kid might know ‘West Side Story,’ but there’s already a remove. It’s nice to be able to share all the music of someone who was like my musical father … with younger people and show them what’s so wonderful about it.”
June 2017
Top Summer Events of 2017 - Don’t miss our editors’ picks for the season’s best happenings for foodies, art buffs, music lovers, and more.
April 2017
Twenty-five years ago, violinist Leslie Tomkins and her pianist/conductor husband Michael Barrett took a rare vacation to Moab. Like so many before them, they fell in love with the red rock and the magical landscape of southeastern Utah, and decided to pay homage to the breath taking surrounding by adding to it the joys of music-making. And so in 1992, they created the Moab Music Festival.