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Performing Arts

[click "Play" to hear Susan's interview with Jennie Franks]

People like secrets. Knowing them makes us feel important, even powerful. Here's one: the Telluride Playwrights Festival. Like the Telluride Musicfest, the Telluride Playwrights Festival is one of the best kept secrets on Telluride's summer cultural calendar –  despite the fact both events feature blue chip talent and reinforce the Telluride brand on world stage.

Last year, for example, the Telluride Playwrights Festival presented a play by Jan Buttram. Her "Phantom Killer” went on to get produced at the Abingdon Theatre in New York City this past February and received great reviews. Another Playwrights Festival alum, Tracy Shaffer, will see her Telluride script, "(W)Hole," go up in Denver this fall. Given the track record, it is a safe bet the  scripts written by this year's crop of carefully vetted playwrights – Philip Gerson, James Still and James McLindon, each highly regarded in the fields of theater and television – will meet with similar success. The best part: You can say you knew them when.
06 July, 2010 /
[click "Play" for Susan's interview with Jim Riley]

Sunset Show Summer traffic in the Telluride region is generally concentrated in our box canyon: the town of Telluride is central ops for all the major festivals, which tend, however, to concentrate their activities over long weekends. Mid-week the action shifts "uptown" to Telluride's sister town, the Mountain Village, where every summer Wednesday night, 6 p.m. rain or shine, the Telluride Mountain Village Owners Association presents the Summer Concert Series.

In its 11th year, the popular program draws on average 1,500 – 2,000 music lovers to the grassy slope known as Sunset Plaza at the top of the Chondala (Lift 1), where everyone seems to enjoy an opportunity to catch up with one another as much as revel in the sounds.
05 July, 2010 /
[to hear BBHC's Sam Andrew talking to Susan, click "Play"]

BBHCoriginalnologos Telluride's Sheridan Opera House welcomes Janis Joplin's original band to town. Big Brother & The Holding Company are performing live concert at the historic venue on Friday, July 2. Show time is 8 p.m. Doors and box office, 7:30 p.m. (Stop by the Sheridan Opera House courtyard from 5-8pm just prior to the show for a free Gala Premiere and Silent Auction, featuring paintings created by artists attending Telluride Plein Air’s 7th Annual Celebration of Outdoor Painting.  Complementary wine sampling and snacks provided.)

Janis Joplin brought her big, bad, bluesy voice from the red dirt of Texas to San Francisco, when "The Haight" was the heart of the drugs, sex and rock 'n roll flower child days of the 1960s. Virtually overnight, thanks to a man named Chet Helms, she went from drifter to a superstar universally described as "the greatest white urban blues and soul singer of her generation." That is, thanks to Helms and the band he managed, Big Brother & The Holding Company, which became Joplin's surrogate family.
30 June, 2010 /
[click "Play" for Adam Neiman's conversation with Susan]

Photo 32 The gravitational center of the Telluride Musicfest, June 23 – July 3, is the founding trio, The Trio Solisti: cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach, pianist Jon Klibonoff, and the event's artistic director, violinist Maria Bachmann. The group is renowned worldwide for sterling technical chops and no-holds-barred passion and lyricism. They play as one with perfect complicity.

"The most exciting piano trio in America," raved The New Yorker.

Like the Telluride Playwrights Festival, Telluride Musicfest is not a high profile event on Telluride's summer Festival calender: except like the heavies – Mountainfilm in Telluride and Telluride Film Festival – both attract world class talent. Case in point for Musicfest, pianist Adam Neiman. Adam joins Maria and the Trio for the 8th annual four-concert series: "From Russia with Love."
23 June, 2010 /
[click "Play" to hear Maria Bachmann's conversation with Susan]

TMF2010 final:highres Blame it on the the Russians. Telluride Musicfest's Maria Bachmann came to the States when her parents were forced to flee their homeland in 1956 after the revolution in her home country, Hungary, failed and the Red Menace tightened its grip. Eva and Tibor Bachmann's grit and self-sacrifice in their adopted country paid off. Son Peter became a dean of math and science at a college outside Philadelphia. And Maria grew up to be a world-renowned violinist, hailed recently (May 25) by The Philadelphia Inquirer for her:


"...near boundless expressive freedom...violinist Maria Bachmann projected the music's emotionalism, and dazzlingly attenuated the final movement in a mounting cauldron of rhythm."
22 June, 2010 /

Telluride Bluegrass Festival may be over, but the beat goes on at Telluride's five-star Wilkinson Public Library. Monday, June 21, 6 p.m. Back for an encore performance, Raina Rose. This young vivacious songwriter from Austin will be performing original songs that speak to life, love and the human condition. 

Tuesday, June 22, 6 p.m.,The Telluride Music Lover’s Film Festival brings a feature and a short. Rachel Liebling, a student of Ken Burns, created a classic of Americana: “High Lonesome”  the Story of Bluegrass  (95 minutes). The music is perfectly synced with its images as in Bill Monroe's seamless walk from concert stage to his old front porch. Ralph Stanley singing "Man of Constant Sorrow". A young Alison Krauss at about the time she won the national fiddling contest. The film is not a complete compendium, a chronological survey, or a definitive look at Bill Monroe, or any of the individual artists, but it is an impassioned portrait of a true American musical art form.

21 June, 2010 /
[click "Play" to hear Peter Rowan's conversation with Susan]

Prowan This iconic performer is about to join the ranks of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival's 30-something club, an elite fraternity that includes among its members The King, Sam Bush, dobro king Jerry Douglas, and Grammy winner Tim O' Brien. He is Telluride Bluegrass veteran Peter Rowan.

Peter Rowan performs at the 37th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival Friday, June 18, 2:30 p.m., in Peter Rowan and Crucial Country with Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. The event marks a reunion of musical titans.
18 June, 2010 /
[click "Play" to listen to Tim O'Brien's conversation with Susan]

Tim O'Brien 2010 Telluride is on a first-name basis Tim O'Brien. He's been here for so many Telluride Bluegrass Festivals, so many nights at the Sheridan Opera House as well. We all know by now, Tim O'Brien is an entire rhythm section unto himself. And a bandleader, songwriter, vocalist and mentor to boot. We know Tim's sound by heart, a hybrid of country, folk, bluegrass and swing often described simply as "Americana." Music with a comfortable, comforting old slipper feel. But with Tim as the filter, everything old comes out new again.

It's no big secret Telluride's on again, he's off again 30-year relationship with Tim is not exclusive: the Grammy (Traditional Folk Category) Tim won in 2005, not to mention countless nods from organizations such as the International Bluegrass Music Awards, is proof, positive his peers and the rest of the world love him too.
17 June, 2010 /