Celebrate summer with 12+ hours of music in Orchestra Hall! Performances include a family concert, chamber music and evening concert with the Minnesota Orchestra. Tour Orchestra Hall, attend a yoga class, visit vendors and more.
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A Few Things To Know
Backstage Tours: Get a behind-the-scenes look at one of Minnesota’s cultural and architectural touchstones, Orchestra Hall. Stand on stage, pretend you’re a conductor or performer, and learn more about what happens before and during a concert!
The viewer enjoys feeling and emotion within each piece.
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Marian Anderson showcases her captivating artwork, featuring the beauty of Minnesota’s landscapes and charming wildlife. Explore the historic E. St. Julien Cox House while experiencing the wonders of the natural world through Marian Anderson’s lens.
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Talent. Passion. Legacy.
Artist Marian Anderson is nationally acclaimed with numerous awards and achievements. Recognition for her diversified subjects comes from a natural ability not only to create a beautiful painting, but to breathe spirit and soul into the paintings.
Marian’s paintings are not just an illustrated subject but within each a story is told. You feel the wind, smell a rose or hear a brook babble. With each brush stroke a breath of life sets Marian Anderson’s art apart. As you immerse yourself into the depths of her painting, her art reflects the beauty of a lifetime of experience of the artist.
The Minnesota Orchestra is recognized for distinguished performances in its home state and around the world, award-winning recordings and broadcasts, educational engagement programs, and commitment to building the orchestral repertoire of the future. In September 2023, the ensemble welcomed Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård as its eleventh music director.
Founded in 1903, the ensemble has a long history of touring, including landmark tours to Cuba and South Africa in the past decade. Touring activities, which were paused due to the pandemic, resumed with a May 2023 residency week in Austin, Minnesota. The Orchestra’s recordings and broadcasts have drawn acclaim since the 1920s, including the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance. Its current ongoing recording project is a series of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies; all ten have been recorded and eight albums have been released, with the final two symphonies to come in subsequent seasons.
Further extending its reach beyond the concert hall, the Orchestra offers This Is Minnesota Orchestra, a series of television and online broadcasts that has earned two Upper Midwest Emmy Award nominations. In July and August the Orchestra offers Summer at Orchestra Hall, a festival guided by pianist and Creative Partner Jon Kimura Parker.
Minnesota has been home to Ken Harmon since moving here in 1981, where he began regularly visiting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) and other parts of the Minnesota Arrowhead region. Beginning in 1997, he and his wife owned a cabin near Grand Marais where their family enjoyed the area for 25 years. Ken continued exploring the area, learning how to photograph the landscapes of the BWCA, Superior National Forest, and the north shore of Lake Superior.
Now residing in Duluth, MN, his goal is to capture images through a variety of intimate landscape scenes that showcase the beauty of the four seasons and share them with the public to highlight this very special region. Ken’s work has been published regionally in print and online.
At 36 feet tall, Long Leif is the largest of the nearly 140 troll sculptures Thomas Dambo has built around the world. He was debuted to a select few on June 6th.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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An art installation of giant wooden trolls in and around Detroit Lakes is designed to give visitors a whimsical experience while drawing attention to trash and recycling.
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MPR: A larger-than-life art installation opened Monday, June 10th in and around Detroit Lakes.
The work of Danish artist Thomas Dambo involves very large trolls made of recycled materials and a fairy tale with clues to help visitors find the sculptures and the ultimate prize, a golden rabbit.
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Thomas Dambo talks to reporters at the site of one of his troll sculptures in the woods near Detroit Lakes.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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Dambo aims for mystery and whimsy in his work with an underlying message of environmental activism.
“And I go to great lengths to hide them because I want to show us all that trash is a treasure,” he said.
In the spirit of mystery and whimsy, Dambo recently brought reporters to a secret hideaway in the woods near Detroit Lakes to see a giant golden rabbit.
He confiscated cell phones and mandated blindfolds for a portion of the noisy, jouncing ride through the woods on an all-terrain vehicle.
There are five giant trolls made of recycled wood in his story, three mirrored portals and the giant rabbit built of recycled plastic bins.
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Workers put the finishing touches on large yellow rabbit made with recycled plastic and hidden in the woods near Detroit Lakes.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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The installation revolves around a fairy tale created by Dambo.
“And in this fairy tale, there is a little bad bunny, a bad rabbit in the story. And this one is hiding somewhere far away that’s really really hard to find,” he explained. “You can only find it if you can solve a riddle.”
The riddle starts in Detroit Lakes City Park with a large troll wielding a spoon. She’s named Alexa Elixir.
“And because it’s named Alexa’s Elixir, I take it really to heart that Tom has made it like this because I love making him elixirs when he’s not feeling so well,” said Dambo’s wife Alexa Piekarski. “It’s like apple cider vinegar, garlic, onion, cayenne pepper, to really try and knock out a sickness if something’s coming on.”
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A troll named Alexa is mixing an elixir as part of a fairy tale written by artist Thomas Dambo. Visitors can use the story to help find giant sculptures scattered around the Detroit Lakes area and as far away as Fargo and Perham.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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Dambo has built sculptures in 17 countries and 19 U.S. states. He called the Detroit Lakes installation his largest to date, and a troll sculpture named Long Leif is, at 36 feet, the tallest sculpture Dambo has constructed.
A work crew of 15 and more than 300 volunteers helped build the sculptures. Dambo creates the heads in his Copenhagen workshop and ships them to the installation site.
Local businesses and individuals donated funds to build each sculpture. Local organizers won’t disclose the total cost of the project.
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Artist Thomas Dambo talks to reporters in a blacked out van used to transport them to a secret location in the woods near Detroit Lakes.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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Volunteer Renee Fasteen was helping build hundreds of bird houses that are part of the art installation.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing that’s happening,” she said. “And I said to myself, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’ll probably regret it.’”
Volunteer Janelle Disrud said the art project has captivated the community.
“People are so excited, from social media to you’ll be sitting in a restaurant and hear people talking about it,” she said. “Everyone’s talking about the trolls and people are very protective of trying to keep the location secret.”
Local tourism officials hope the trolls bring more visitors to a town that’s already a Minnesota tourist destination.
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The head of a wooden troll built by Danish artist Thomas Dambo.
Dan Gunderson | MPR News
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Dambo is excited to see this installation completed and said he was delighted to hear that the company whose yellow plastic bins he rescued from the landfill to build a golden rabbit has decided to find a way to recycle those bins.
“For me that’s what makes me feel like a proud daddy — that the art can have this impact. It’s those small steps that I think matter so that we end up being able to develop a cleaner, nicer future for the next generation.”
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As the 2023–24 season comes to a close, we’ll have plenty of reasons to celebrate: an extraordinary first season with Thomas Søndergård as our music director and the month-long Pride festivities here in Minneapolis and around the country. In a program close to Thomas’ heart, we invite you to join us for music by composers from the LGBTQ+ community featuring the Minnesota Orchestra return of soloist Francesco Piemontesi and culminating with the fireworks of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
