The 2025 Farmers Night Series presents: Composer/ Pianist David Feurzeig, "Playing Every Town"

Mark your calendars for the second Farmers Night of 2025 a performance on Wednesday January 29 will feature Composer/ Pianist David Feurzeig, "Playing Every Town" with Montpelier High School students Zoe Keuhl, alto saxophone and Isla Robechek violin.

In May 2022 David Feurzeig embarked on Play Every Town: with a goal to play free concerts in each of Vermont's 252 towns. This Famers Night concert will be #74 in his series.

Feurzeig a UVM music professor has been touring Vermont towns since May 2022 with a purpose to build awareness about climate change through his unique musical compositions-- incorporating classical, jazz, avant-garde, and popular traditions. These striking juxtapositions, peppered with informative and humorous commentary, create eye- and ear-opening programs that will change how you hear all kinds of music.

The Farmers Night concert will include Mozart's beloved variations on "Twinkle Twinkle" from 1781, the year Montpelier was chartered, and Beethoven's Sonata op. 49 no. 2 published in 1805, the year Montpelier was proclaimed the state capitol…with Louis Bergé's Capitol March thrown in for good measure. The present state house was completed in 1859, the same year abolitionist John Brown was executed and his body transferred across Vermont; a Vermont minister gave the eulogy (and was fired from his Burlington church as a result).

To honor these events, David will lead a singalong of "John Brown's Body". An Arabesque by Debussy will mark the year Montpelier became its own city, while his evocative "The Sunken Cathedral", written in response to Paris's record flood of 1910, will mark Montpelier's own watery tribulations, past and present. Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments" from Blues and the Abstract Truth, was released in 1961, the year the State House's Wurlitzer piano was manufactured. Like every concert in the project, this one will include its own unique sonata by Domenico Scarlatti: Sonata no. 74 for this seventy-fourth concert in the project. Other solo pieces will round out the program. Admission is free, with voluntary donations going to the VT Flood Response & Recovery Fund.

This year's Farmers Night offerings from January - April include 12 weekly Wednesday performances, with the exception of a break for Town Meeting in early March.

The Farmers Night Concert Series is a longstanding State House tradition which goes back over 100 years to a time when lawmakers entertained themselves in the House Chamber mid-week while away from home. Artists from around the state, in genres ranging from classical music to bluegrass to barbershop, perform in the well of the House Chamber each Wednesday night during the legislative session—and the concerts are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC.

Event Info

Jan 28, 2025, 11 AM to 3:30 PM

Feb 1, 2025, 6 to 8 PM

Feb 2, 2025, 10 AM to 3 PM