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“Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak,” wrote William Congreve in his 1697 play The Mourning Bride. It also lessens the strain of labor, adds sweetness to hours of leisure and provides a particularly potent means of stirring nostalgia. Whether your breast be unusually savage, your knotted oak in need of straightening or your date night wanting a cheap stimulant—there are abundant musical offerings this summer around Milwaukee. Here are four free musical events in the offing.
Opera is much more than bellowing in viking helmets. With a repertoire that includes classics as well as contemporary, locally sourced works, the relentlessly creative Milwaukee Opera Theatre will forever change the sights and sounds that you associate with opera. Their newest production, Thank You, Next! (a reality opera), will be performed at Carroll University Studio Theatre June 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m. The reality opera—or, as the kids are saying these days, “meta” opera—depicts what happens outside an audition room for an opera festival. Piercing voices with bombastic personalities to match are mixed in a pressure-cooker of a situation to hilarious results. The event is free, but seating is limited, so don’t hesitate to reserve your seat by contacting Jillanna@milwaukeeoperatheatre.org.
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The Bay View Neighborhood Association has recently released the summer 2015 line up for Chill on the Hill, a free outdoor music series that takes place on Tuesdays from 6-8:30 p.m. at Bay View’s Humboldt Park Band Chalet. Last year, on average 2,500 people attended each week’s concert, which range in genre from folk to funk to reggae to rock to Irish to indie. On June 2, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra will kick off Chill on the Hill with works by Williams, Wagner, Bernstein, Ellington and more. The 2015 line up can be found at the BVNA’s website.
Not to be outdone by Chill on the Hill, the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum has also announced the lineup for its Café Sopra Mare summer music series. Equal to Chill on the Hill in musical diversity, Villa Terrace’s Mercury Courtyard is a more intimate location with more intimate programming to match. Solo guitarists, solo accordions, a steel drum-marimba duo and jazz quartets give a sense of the music to be expected. Café Sopra Mare will also appeal to early birds since the music takes place from 10:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. each Sunday beginning June 7. Admission is free and Bella Caffe will offer coffee, tea and fresh pastries à la carte. The schedule for Café Sopra Mare.
Present Music is Milwaukee’s internationally acclaimed new music ensemble. In addition to performing the repertoire, the ensemble also adds to it. ComposeMilwaukee is the organization’s new corporate and community engagement program, the mission of which is to promote innovation, imagination and collaboration. Several local companies worked with a professional composer to discover sounds that are significant to them and to use contemporary compositional techniques to incorporate these sounds into musical works. The result is a series of tone poems that capture the sound of Milwaukee. The free concert of these works takes place at 1 p.m. on Sunday, June 7, at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
