Top musicians converge on Brainerd for a classical music festival (with a side of water skiing)

BAXTER, Minn. – Finally, after a flight delay and a flat tire, Alexander Peña and Samantha Rodriguez pulled into a long driveway lined with trees.

"That's them!" Sally Campbell told her grandkids, grinning. Peña popped out of the car and spread open his arms. Campbell opened hers wider.

"How are you, love?" he asked, holding her tight.

Each summer for 16 years, Peña, a violist, has trekked to Brainerd for a once fledgling, now formidable classical music festival. For 12 of those years, he's stayed with Campbell, becoming a constant in her camera roll and a regular at her family gatherings.

"At this point, I have a Brainerd family," said Peña, who lives in Hawaii, where he is director of orchestras at the 'Iolani School. "I literally call her my Minnesota mom."

The Lakes Area Music Festival, which runs through Aug. 18, started 16 years ago when the festival's co-founder, Scott Lykins, who grew up in nearby Nisswa, invited a few fellow students at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. including Peña, to come home with him one summer. They waited tables at a local resort and performed at Lutheran churches.

That first year, the festival counted eight musicians, six concerts and a budget of about $4,000. Now, it boasts 256 professional artists, dozens of events and a $1.2 million budget. There's a gala, an opera, a state-of-the-art auditorium.

But musicians still stay in homes.

Since its early days, the summer festival has relied on local volunteers to open their spare bedrooms, cabins and campers to musicians who trek to Minnesota from across the country, and in recent years, the world.

"In those first years, it was a necessity to not have the expense of housing people in resorts or hotels," said Lykins, 38, the festival's artistic and executive director. "And that is still a big part of it. But we have also recognized that there's a tremendous value in homestays, because it's building relationships. ...

"Even people who wouldn't consider themselves classical music fans, when they can show up and point out the people that are their musicians sitting onstage, it just transforms that experience."

Even as this festival's calendar, roster and ambitions have swelled, the nonprofit remains a complex dance, one further complicated by the Delta airlines debacle last month, which hit just as some musicians were leaving for Minnesota.

"We call it car ballet," said John Taylor Ward, co-founder and artistic director, describing the logistical challenges of bringing 250 musicians to central Minnesota for a festival that now includes not only concerts, but a composer fellowship and a children's camp.

The nonprofit is always pushing up against its limits, asking more of its musicians and volunteers, Ward said. "As a performer, you want to feel like you are stretching just beyond what you've done before."

'An incredible spark'

When Lykins was at Eastman, many of his friends spent their summers at festivals, practicing and performing. But Lykins needed to make money. So, he took a job at the Lost Lake Lodge.

He persuaded four friends to come along, touting the lakes' beauty and the free room and board. To keep up their chops, they performed, inviting up a few other friends. As classical ensembles go, it was an odd mix of musicians: a cellist, a violist, a baritone and two vocalists.

"There was just a kind of an incredible spark," Peña said. "We, the musicians who are not from Minnesota, realized how much this particular community loves classical music, wants classical music. They were really hungry for it."

Lykins' late mother, a former kindergarten teacher, handled marketing, passing out pamphlets from her purse at the grocery store and the bank. Lykins' father handled logistics, fetching musicians from the airport.

Sixteen years later, the festival still relies on volunteers. Clarice Renschler has served as an usher "from the beginning." Charlie Johnson uses his trailer to move whatever needs moving. Each year, Luann Rice, now in her 80s, made cards by hand for the musicians to use to thank their host families. (This year, there were just too many musicians to keep up.)

By the time Matt Abramo, a bassist with the Nashville Symphony, awoke on his first morning in Minnesota this summer, the banana bread was already sliced for breakfast. Arla Johnson, 80, has hosted Abramo and his friend and fellow bassist Paul Macres for a decade. In the early years, Johnson would offer them eggs, toast and fruit.

But "all they really wanted was the banana bread," Johnson said. "I make banana bread and freeze it now, because I can't keep up."

For years, Johnson was the festival's housing coordinator, a tricky post, given the summer competition for spare bedrooms in the lake-studded region. As the festival's reach widened, Johnson remembers first seeing a musician from Argentina on the roster. "Holy cow," she thought, "this is getting big." Abramo and Macres not only became regulars, they began texting with Johnson throughout the year. Recently, she visited Macres in New Orleans, where the Minnesota-born musician now plays with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

"They are both such nice young men," she said.

'A real adventure'

The festival's programming is ambitious, Abramo said. Over 11 days, he was set to play five different programs. But part of the appeal is "spending time with her and Charlie," Abramo said. "We've gotten real close over the years."

"For a community of this size to have this opportunity is just amazing," said Johnson, adding: "It's been a real adventure for a lot of these musicians, too."

Abramo attended his first fish fry. Peña learned to water ski. Last summer, music director Christian Reif, who also stays at a family's lakeside home, tried a jet ski.

Peña, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, wasn't sure whether this small-town community would welcome him. "I stick out like a sore thumb in this area," he said.

But Campbell's family embraced him and his husband without reserve. As Minnesota debated — then defeated — a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, they had long conversations about life and love. Sally makes Peña berry smoothies. Reed leaves him cookies beside his bed.

"For my husband and I to be welcomed into somebody's home as a gay, married couple that are teaching young people about the arts is incredibly special," said Peña, who now directs the festival's Explore Music day camp for kids, which two of the Campbells' grandchildren attend.

Big ambitions

At the orchestra's first rehearsal in late July, musicians settled into their spots onstage at the Gichi-ziibi Center for the Arts, waving and hugging and chatting. Then they opened up the score of the biggest, most ambitious work in the fest's history: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Lykins popped onto the podium and gave a big, loose wave.

"Hello, welcome! It's always nice to see everyone in their seats," he said. The musicians cheered. Then Lykins introduced "Grammy-winning music director Christian Reif," before stepping offstage, a laptop tucked under his arm.

Lykins had gala logistics to sort out and a box office call to hop on. But as the strings began the symphony's first movement with their quiet pulses, Lykins lingered in the auditorium, listening.

For a long time, Lykins was the face of this festival. Volunteers and attendees told him that they knew his mother, gave him swim lessons or heard him play cello as a child. Even as the festival has gotten more ambitious, it has remained closely tethered to the community where he grew up, learning cello.

Two examples: The nonprofit recently hired a year-round staff member to work with the school and provide lessons for students outside of it. The chorus for Beethoven's symphony featured not only VocalEssence, the Minneapolis-based choir, but the Legacy Chorale of Greater Minnesota and members of the Brainerd High School A Cappella Choir.

Friends and family members of those singers were among the attendees who packed the 1,200-seat auditorium. In a first for the festival, that concert sold out.

Before the symphony's epic conclusion, before a long standing ovation, before the soloists took their bows, Lykins took a moment to honor those who weren't onstage. "If you have given of your time and talents this year as a volunteer or are signed up to do so, we want you to stand up to be recognized," he said.

The house lights flicked on, and a few dozen volunteers in the auditorium rose from their seats.

The audience cheered, but the musicians cheered harder. A few waved, too.