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Music festival hosts fiddler O’Connor in livestreamed concert
Grammy-winning violinist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Mark O’Connor and his wife Maggie, performing and speaking from their home in North Carolina, will be the performers in this week’s Greencastle Virtual Music Festival event.
The music festival and the DePauw Performing Arts Series are co-presenting the special livestreamed event at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at http://gvmf.live with
The late Chet Atkins said of Mark, “He’s one of the few musicians I pay to go see,” and James Taylor observed, “He’s really one in a million. We won’t see a lot more like him in this generation.”
The O’Connors perform an eclectic mix of bluegrass and traditional country music, newgrass and Gypsy jazz, as well as Mark O’Connor’s own compositions rendered in a neo-traditional mode of American art music.
“Mark and Maggie have toured internationally, and during the pandemic Mark has ingeniously turned their living room into a multi-camera livestreaming performance space, which combines the professionalism of the concert stage with the intimacy of a home,” said Eric Edberg, the DePauw emeritus music professor who is the festival’s founder and host.
“Imagine having artists like these actually in your living room, talking with you,” Edberg continued. “That’s what will happen Wednesday night. You can watch videos of them any time. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually talk with them as well as experience their live, in-the-moment music making. It’s a wonderful gift from DePauw to our community to make artists of this level of accomplishment and fame available without charge.”
The livestream performance begins at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and can be heard and seen in a watch party with post-concert discussion hosted by Edberg at http://gvmf.live.
The Zoom concert and discussion also will be streamed on the Greencastle Virtual Music Festival’s Facebook page, YouTube channel and website, greencastlemusic.org.
To talk with the O’Connors, audience members will need to participate in the Zoom event on a computer, tablet or smartphone.
Mark O’Connor first came into prominence in the public eye when as a young teenaged traditional fiddling prodigy he won several national competitive championships on not only fiddle, but also mandolin and guitar.
At the age of 13 he became the youngest musician ever to sign a record deal with the prestigious folk label Rounder Records, and since has gone on to record 46 albums with artists as far ranging as Yo Yo Ma, Stephane Grappelli, the Chicago Symphony, Bela Fleck and Dolly Parton, garnering three Grammys along the way.
O’Connor has also composed concertos and other compositions for orchestras, string quartets and trios and is an innovative educator, having developed and widely taught the O’Connor Method: A New American School of String Playing, based on rhythmic discipline, ear training and improvisation and a knowledge and mastery of traditional North American playing technique.
Maggie O’Connor is a member of her husband’s Grammy Award-winning band and performs with him as a duo.
Most recently, they have started a live weekly virtual show titled “Mondays with Mark and Maggie,” in which the two perform and share stories about their musical experiences and feature special guests that have included Rachel Barton Pine, Máiréad Nesbitt, Jonathan Wilson, Kelly Hall-Tomkins, Xavier Foley and more.
With a unique background in both traditional classical violin training and American musical styles, Maggie continues her mission to show that violinists can and should participate in everything the instrument has to offer.
With the Mark O’Connor Band, Maggie has performed at the 59th Grammy Awards Ceremony in 2017 where the group also won for “Best Bluegrass Album of the Year”.
The Greencastle Virtual Music Festival programs are made possible by the Greencastle Summer Music Festival family of donors and the GSMF endowment at the Putnam County Community Foundation, the Putnam County Convention and Visitors Bureau, the DePauw Performing Arts Series, the Inn at DePauw, the people of Gobin Church and in partnership with the Sunny Side concert series.
All 24 previous weekly GVMF programs are available at http://playlist.gvmf.live. Send a message to greencastlevmf@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.