Saturday night is the student concert and barn dance of the Mike Block String Camp. Then, next week, the second string arrives – but that hardly applies, since this is the advanced section and includes a new effort called Florida Band Incubator.
Block, the Juilliard-trained cellist who is part of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, launched the Vero Beach International Music Festival a few years back, an ambitious-sounding proposition that is increasingly becoming a reality. Not only has Block continued to attract stellar talent to his faculty, he has finagled a way to add novice professionals to the mix. The camp’s Florida Band Incubator is intended to give new bands not only the performance polish they need, but the business savvy to survive.
This inaugural year, the String Camp faculty will be coaching the Sound Accord, a group of six fiddlers and cellists who met – of all places – at fiddle camps. Longtime Vero camp instructor Hanneke Cassel wrote a positive blurb on the group’s website, so we can assume they’ve already been vetted by more than an audition tape. The chamber-folk string sextet has performed mostly in Arizona, but opened for a recent performance in Cambridge, Mass., for Natalie Haas, another regular on the String Camp faculty.
Sound Accord will join the camp’s advanced students at the String Camp Extension Week. They all will perform along with faculty next Thursday and Friday nights, July 14 and 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church.
And of course, Wednesday, July 13, is the concert of the second week’s faculty on its own, with five new string players joining Block and Cassel. That concert, too, is at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian.
Riverside Theatre’s new Howl at the Moon event returns this weekend with different musicians and, of course, a different audience – unless the same crowd that was there two weekends ago packs the place again. This time, the pianists are Rob Volpe and John Kenney. It’s a gig that for me would seem more like waterboarding than keyboarding, having to take audience requests and deliver to a crowd from 28 to 88. The Howl franchise somehow figures out how to recruit, based on the last performances: These are polished performers with memories the size of search engines and the ability to turn on a dime from Frank Sinatra to Sinead O’Connor.
If you’re interested in a more homogenous music mix, a summer outdoor rock concert might be just the thing and there’s a string of them coming up at West Palm’s Perfect Vodka Amphitheatre (formerly Cruzan).
Friday night, Modest Mouse co-headlines with Brand New. Modest Mouse worked hard at an off-beat indie-rock sound through the early 2000s, then went mostly dark in 2007. Then last year, the group put out its first full-length album of new songs since 2007. As for Brand New, they’re old news as of this tour: They just announced they’re breaking up.
Anybody remember Y2K? Next Saturday, July 16, the My2K Tour comes to the same amphitheater, featuring boy band 98 Degrees; the girl band Dream; Ryan Cabrera; and O-town, the group formed in an MTV reality show.
Then, in quick succession, the legendary Snoop Dogg and the news-making Wiz Khalifa (he’s being sued by his label) perform on Wednesday, July 20. On Friday, July 22, the Counting Crows and Rob Thomas, the Orlando-reared songwriter and lead singer from Matchbox Twenty, kick off a 40-city tour. The following Wednesday, Gwen Stefani plays with her early-2000s complement, Eve, on July 27. And on Aug. 5, the ’90s punk-pop band Blink 182 takes the stage.
While a new exhibit at the Vero Beach Museum of Art features art inspired by space exploration (more on that in this section), art in public places offers a boost where you least expect it, and in this case, may need it most.
The Indian River County Courthouse may not be tops on your list for a culture fix, but for the lawyers, judges, would-be jurors and would-rather-not-be family members, the stately halls have been hung with some pretty spectacular paintings lately. Shotsi LaJoie, one of the founding artists at Tiger Lily downtown, has been at work on the large abstracts for several years now, having turned from sculpture and ceramics. Her works are throughout the building this month and next.
