Pine Mountain Music Festival

A cellist from the Lyric Opera of Chicago orchestra founded this in 1991, inviting colleagues up to Iron Mountain for a week of chamber music; opera arrived the following year. Performances now tour between Upper Peninsula towns a hundred miles apart, and across three decades the festival has staged 36 operas - including 'Rockland,' commissioned about a forgotten miners' strike in Ontonagon County where deputies shot two striking Finns. One of them wrote an account of it; his grandson read it generations later and thought it should be an opera. It premiered in Finland before coming home to the U.P.

Dates

Mid-to-late June (week-long, touring UP venues)

Town

Iron Mountain, Michigan

Venue

Multiple venues across the Upper Peninsula

Price

Paid (ticketed; some free children's concerts)

Type

Music (classical)