Grammy Award-winning cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogio went to Eureka Springs two years ago for a concert with the Eroica Trio and something about the town spoke to her.
She has decided it'd make a great place for an annual chamber music festival.
"The whole time I was there, I just loved the town," Sant'Ambrogio says. "It was really idyllic and [with] its placement in the region, it just seemed like the perfect place to bring people from all the different towns around to experience great music together.
"Eureka Springs seems to have this great classic vibe to it, but it's very modern as well. So I just thought, 'Wow, this is a place that would be so wonderful to create a little jewel of a music festival.'"
Toward that end, Sant'Ambrogio and pianist Robert Koenig will play a recital at 2 p.m. today at The Auditorium, 36 S. Main St., Eureka Springs, to raise awareness and support for the festival, which she hopes to have in place by the summer of 2015 and which she is calling "Eureka Springs Into Music!"
The program is a shortened version of one titled "The New World: Music From North & South America," and will include a Porgy and Bess Fantasy -- her arrangement of music by George Gershwin -- and pieces by Latin-American composers Astor Piazzolla, Enrique Granados and Gaspar Cassado. A reception will follow. Tickets are $10. Visit theauditorium.org.
"I could bring audiences to this town, and I could bring myself and colleagues and get together and make great music," Sant'Ambrogio says, noting that the Northwest Arkansas town offers lots of venues outside the city auditorium.
"In one week you might have three concerts in the auditorium, but you'll also have one in a Spanish restaurant, where you'll do 'Tangos & Tapas,' and another one where you do 'Brunch With Bach.' And another where you do 'Lunch With the Ladies.'
"You do outreach stuff, where you go and really reach the community, so the whole community gets to hear this great music and it doesn't always have to be in this big chunk of a formal concert.
"Also, you whet the appetite for more. Especially for the kids in schools -- after my formal concert, I get so many parents come up to me and say, 'Well, my son heard you in his school, and absolutely begged the whole family to come, and our kid dragged us to your concert; we had a great time and we haven't seen him so excited in a long time.' "
Another possibility: satellite concerts at the Crystal Bridges Museum in nearby Bentonville.
"I dearly love American music, so I think it would be a really great fit to do some American music concerts based around the American art that's in their collection," she says.
Sant'Ambrogio is aware that Eureka Springs has a history of one-and-done festivals, for which the "second annual" never actually materializes. The classical music festival that brought in the Eroica Trio in August 2012 was one such.
"I had a pretty good feeling that that was not going to work, because I looked at the business model; it didn't add up, sense- and cents-wise," she says.
But, citing her family history, she says she has come up with a better model. Her father, John Sant'Ambrogio, principal cellist with the Saint Louis Symphony from 1968 to 2005; her sister, violinist Stephanie Sant'Ambrogio, concertmaster of the San Antonio Symphony from 1994 until 2007; and her grandmother, concert pianist Isabelle Sant'Ambrogio; have all started successful music festivals, she says.
"One of the most important things, no matter how many great ideas you have, it never makes sense to try them all out the first year and overreach. What I want to do in 2015 is just one week of concerts, and keep it to a very small group of musicians," she says. "And we'll build on that, slowly. But to try to do chamber music and orchestra and a music camp, that's massive and you need a huge infrastructure to keep that going.
"You need to look at the community to see what they want and what they'll support. So we'll start with one week and see how that goes and see if we can keep that running fiscally responsibly. And we'll see as we go, if we can expand to 10 days, we'll do that, and if we can then expand to two weeks, we'll do that."
The longevity of Eureka Springs-based Opera in the Ozarks, which just wrapped up its 64th season, proves to her that there's clearly an appetite in the region for classical music, but the success of the town's other annual musical festivals -- including jazz, blues and bluegrass -- also proves there's something to be said for eventually diversifying.
"I think that it's absolutely do-able," she says. "There's no shame in being smart and starting slowly and small and not expanding beyond what the community will support.
"I've enjoyed enormously performing with Sting and with Rufus Wainwright and with jazz players. I'm definitely going to put the main focus at first on classical music, which is my forte, but I cut an album with [soft-jazz keyboard legend] Bob James.
"I don't think there should be artificial barriers between different types of music; it's all music, it's all about communicating the human condition and human emotions and our lives and the joy and beauty of life. If one day we have [violinist] Joshua Bell playing a recital and the next day we have Bob James playing with his jazz quartet, well, the more the merrier."
Style on 08/24/2014