From Manilow to Mozart, Sunriver maestro Brett Mitchell is an all-around music fan

Published 11:00 am Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Sunriver Music Festival kicks off Saturday, with four classical concerts, a family concert and the ever-popular, and often sold-out, pops concert over the next week and a half in Bend and Sunriver.

The festival opens at the Tower Theatre with an evening program titled “A French Soiree,” followed by the Pops Concert Sunday night, also in the downtown Bend theater.

Concerts continue apace, through Aug. 11’s Season Finale Classical Concert, “Vienna Waits for You,” with music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, among the many composers who called the Austrian city home.

But if, like Brett Mitchell, conductor and music director of the seasonal classical festival, you’re a Billy Joel fan, you know that the concert’s title is a pulled directly from the lyrics of “Vienna,” the B-Side to Joel’s 1977 single “Just the Way You Are.”

“I really am a subscriber to Duke Ellington’s great aphorism, which is, ‘There’s only two kinds of music. There’s good music, and there’s bad music,'” Mitchell said.

First came rock

Mitchell’s classical bona fides include his service as current music director of the Pasadena Symphony, and previous stints as music director of the Colorado Symphony, associate conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra and assistant conductor of both the Houston Symphony and Orchestre National de France. In May, Mitchell stepped in for conductor Juanjo Mena and made his subscription debut with the New York Philharmonic with less the 24 hours’ notice, receiving wide praise in reviews of his work.

Brett Mitchell, artistic director and conductor of the Sunriver Music Festival. (David Young-Wolff)

But Mitchell is also a rock and pop aficionado. The array of autographs on the wall of his home studio attests to his wide and varied musical influences and tastes:

“I’m in my studio right now, and I’ve got to my left what I call my autograph wall, and I’ll tell you who’s autographs are on this wall,” Mitchell said. “The autographs are Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, John Williams, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and Tony Bennett.”

If there are any aesthetes turning a nose up at the very notion of this diverse group sharing space on Mitchell’s wall or playlists, know this: He grew up in a non-musical family, and from a young age, rock and pop were his entry points into what he does professionally now.

We mean very young.

In the early ’80s, when he was 3 years old, he heard a song on the radio and asked his mom, who was getting ready for work, if they had it on vinyl.

“She said, ‘We do have a record of it.'”

Mitchell told his mom he wanted to take said record and his Fisher-Price record player to his caretaker, Janet’s house. His mom said Janet probably already knew the song. But he was determined to do it his was. His mom gave in on the record, but told him Janet has her own record player.

“I said, ‘No mom, I really want to take our record and my record player.’ And rather than argue with a 3-year-old, which is never a winning proposition — which I can attest to because we have a 3-year-old right now — she said, ‘OK.'”

Oh Mandy

When they arrived at Janet’s, the future conductor stopped his mom from leaving to head to work, he insisted the three of them sit together and listen to it.

The record: “Mandy,” Manilow’s 1975 no. 1 song, in which Mandy came and gave without taking. “The thing I have up on my wall — there was a silver record released for ‘Mandy’s’ 40th anniversary like 10 years ago, that Barry signed however many of.

Brett Mitchell leads the Sunriver Music Festival (David Young-Wolff)

“It’s funny, because people hear, you know, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, John Williams up on my wall with the silver record of ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow, and it’s like, ‘Guys, this is what I’m talking about,'” Mitchell said. “I tell that story all the time because it’s a cute story … but here’s what it really is. I found music that I loved, and I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.

“Now, when I was 3, that was for my mom and my caretaker on a living room floor in Seattle,” he added. “Now I get to do it — I opened the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom season (that’s the name of its summer performance venue) for 20,000 people a couple of weekends ago. So when you ask do I listen to pop, I do listen to pop. I listen to jazz. I listen to almost everything but classical to be honest with you, because I’m always working on classical music. That’s what I do all the time.

“The last thing I want to do when I’ve finished a day of studying Mozart is go listen to more Mozart. I’d much rather listen to Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans.”

The early ’90s

Knowing he was 3 in the early ’80s and living in the Pacific Northwest, you can probably guess what genre he got into after the smooth rock of Manilow.

Before becoming an accomplished classical conductor, Brett Mitchell was a kid who liked Nirvana. (Roger Mastroianni)

“I was born in 1979 in Seattle,” he said. “By the time I got to middle school in 1991, it was Nirvana, it was Pearl Jam, it was Soundgarden.”

Crack open his middle school yearbook to “whatever page you want, every one of us is in flannels and ripped jeans,” he said, laughing.

He’s chiefly a Nirvana guy: “I thought Nirvana was as good as it got.” He even preferred the raucous, Steve Albini-engineered “In Utero” over the polished, Butch Vig-produced breakthrough “Nevermind.”

For him, there’s a common thread among all the songwriters and composers he’s come to love in his work and his free time that ties it all together.

Because of the way Mitchell had always viewed music, when he began exploring classical at age 15, “It didn’t strike me as any different from Nirvana,” he said. “Here’s a guy dealing with some serious things in his life, and has chosen, as part of the way that he’s going to work through these things, he has chosen to share that with the rest of us, to make the rest of us feel less alone. That’s exactly what Kurt Cobain was doing. That’s exactly what Beethoven was doing.”

“To me, it’s all the same,” he said.

Sunriver Music Festival schedule

Saturday — “A French Soiree,” 7:30 p.m., Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend

Soloist: Stewart Goodyear, piano; program includes Fanfare from La Péri (Dukas), Piano Concerto in G Major (Ravel),  Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande (Faure) and Selections from “Carmen” (Bizet)

Sunday — “A Tribute to Broadway and Film Music,” 7:30 p.m., Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend

Enjoy the Festival Orchestra in a tribute celebrating musical anniversaries from Broadway and Film. Highlights include music from “Carousel,” “A Chorus Line,” “Chicago,” “The Sound of Music,” “Jaws,” “Out of Africa” and  hits from composer Leroy Anderson.

Aug. 7 — Classical Concert II: “The Classical Tradition,”  7:30 p.m., Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend
Soloist: Mark Kosower, cello

Commedia for (Almost) 18th-Century Orchestra (William Bolcom), Variations on a Rococo Theme (Tchaikovsky), Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” (Mozart), Danses Concertantes (Stravinsky)

Aug. 8 — Family Concert, 3 p.m., Benham Hall at SHARC, Sunriver
Guest artist: Fiona Curley, soprano (2025 Young Artists Scholarship Recipient)

Violinist Yi Zhao plays on Classical Concert III Aug. 11 at the Sunriver Resort Great Hall.

Bring the family to this informal, one-hour concert featuring a virtuosic soprano with the Festival Orchestra. Various sections of the orchestra are introduced for young ears to enjoy. An instrument petting zoo is offered prior to the concert.

Aug. 11 — Classical Concert III: The Leipzig Connection, 7:30 p.m., Sunriver Resort Great Hall, 57081 Great Hall Loop, Sunriver
Soloist: Yi Zhao, violin

This program highlights the three Leipzig, Germany, composer. The evening begins with Schumann’s Manfred Overture, followed by Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto performed by Concertmaster Yi Zhao. The second half is dedicated to Bach, including an arrangement of the Toccata and Fugue and Orchestral Suite No. 3.

Aug. 12 — Solo Piano Concert with Vitaly Starikov, 7:30 p.m., Sunriver Resort Great Hall, 57081 Great Hall Loop, Sunriver

Solo piano program with Starikov, 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Silver Medalist. Program features Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13; Du bist die Ruh (Schubert-Liszt), SHOSTAKOVICH  Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 12 (Shostakovich),  Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (Liszt) and Études, Op. 25 (Chopin)

Aug. 13 — “Vienna Waits for You”; Sunriver Great Hall, SOLD OUT. Email tickets@sunrivermusic.org to be added to the waitlist.

For prices and more information, visit sunrivermusic.org