A Family Affair with Midsummer’s Music

The Preucil Family, clockwise from top: Anthony, Stephanie, Walter, James and Zachary in 2010. Photo courtesy of Midsummer’s Music Festival.

Door County’s Midsummer’s Music Festival kicks off with a gala opening night concert and celebration on June 12 at 7 pm in Juniper Hall at the Birch Creek Music Performance Center in Egg Harbor. For this special 25th anniversary season opener, the festival will welcome to the stage the talented Preucil family whose story is deeply entwined in the history of Midsummer’s Music Festival. After a special pre-concert performance by the Preucils, the renowned musicians of Midsummer’s Music will perform lovely chamber works, including the Schumann Piano Quartet that they played on their very first concert in 1991, to celebrate the opening of the season.

Twenty-five years ago, festival founders Jim and Jean Berkenstock invited a young couple, along with other top-flight musicians from the Midwest, to join them for the first season of the Midsummer’s Music festival. Walter Preucil was a cellist with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and his wife Stephanie was an accomplished violinist. Stephanie gave birth to the couple’s first child eight months before the start of the first season. Over the next several years, the couple had two more sons, Anthony and James. The apple did not fall far from the tree; each of the Preucil boys has the family’s musical talent.

Walter and Stephanie have spent every summer in Door County performing with Midsummer’s Music, and their boys have become favorites of Door County audiences who have essentially watched them grow up. Now Zachary is an accomplished cellist at age 24 and is on the cello faculty of the renowned Music Institute of Chicago. Eighteen-year-old Anthony has been concertmaster for the Schaumburg Youth Symphony Orchestra as well as the District 211 Honors Orchestra. Thirteen-year-old James is a skilled violinist who is the youngest member to have been accepted into the Schaumburg Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Guests will have the opportunity to mingle with the Preucils, the Berkenstocks and all of the Midsummer’s Music performers at a special reception of wine and hors d’oeuvres.

Tickets for the opening night gala are $60. For more information, visit midsummersmusic.com or call 920.854.7088.