Fast and furious fiddlers’ delights, from Appalachia to Ireland and mountains to hollers, will be on the bill when Poughkeepsie Playlist comes to The Mainstay on Sunday, March 25. What could be more fun on a Sunday afternoon than Whiskey Before Breakfast and Hangman’s Reel tossed out as ear candy by four terrific musicians?
Andrea Velasquez, Rachel Conklin, Michael Champagne and Stephen Minor are superb National Music Festival alums who’ll leave Bach at home when they pack up fiddles and guitars and head for Rock Hall. This toe-tapping, hand-clapping gig will be an early spring change of pace for the NMF’s Resonance concert series, just two months before the two-week classical festival which will be held June 3-16 this year.
It’ll be one fiddler’s amuse bouche after another at The Mainstay, from reels to polkas and great old tunes that inevitably sound familiar. NMF Music Director Richard Rosenberg describes the Poughkeepsie Playlist foursome is “an eccentric string band with a classical flair.”
The names of the pieces in their repertoire are almost as wonderful as the music itself: Soldier’s Joy, Catharsis, Ashoken Farewell, Off She Goes, Black Velvet Walk and Crested Hens. If you haven’t heard Limerock in a long time (or ever), you might listen to someone play it on YouTube now, then nab a ticket for the March 25th show. When you hear the classically trained masters play it live at The Mainstay, it’ll be a performance you won’t soon forget. Lots of folks in the audience will scoot to the edge of their chairs as the pitch rises and the tempo quickens, when it’s hard to believe those fingers and bows can fly any faster.
Fiddling like that is the best kind of contest, where the music is great and everyone’s rooting for a tie! And in the end, as the last notes soar, the room will explode with crowd- pleasing joy.
Single tickets are $20 and can be purchased online or at the door; children and students are $5 at the door. For ticket information, go to nationalmusic.us/events-and- tickets/single-concert-tickets/.
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~ National Music Festival