A world of music awaits fans this summer at Wintergreen

This year’s Wintergreen Summer Music Festival will serve up a variety of Mediterranean flavors.

“Realms of Gold: A Mediterranean Odyssey,” the 15th annual festival at the Wintergreen Resort in Nelson County, will offer 225 events between July 6 and Aug. 7. The menu covers a lot of musical and cultural ground, touching on Italy, Greece, Croatia, Malta, Algeria, Spain, France and Egypt.

And it’s by no means limited to classical music. There will be wine tastings, cooking classes, a dinner at Monticello, a nighttime hike, a neighborhood block party and an exhibit of Pablo Picasso prints. Along the way, listeners can meet a Turkish double bass virtuoso, hear the versatility of a button accordion called the bayan played by a Croatian guest soloist and follow chamber music concerts with gelato. The zip line and tubing park at Discovery Ridge are among the options for family activities.

“It’s serious music, but you’ve got to have some fun,” said Larry Alan Smith, who is in his fifth year as artistic and executive director. “The idea is to celebrate the music and the cultures.”

Smith unveiled this year’s offerings Tuesday.

Familiar local faces also can be seen in the mountains when the Charlottesville Municipal Band performs a Mediterranean-themed program on July 23 and Ash Lawn Opera presents “Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville)” on July 9.

The timing of July 4 on a Monday this year ends up creating a fifth weekend for the festival, extending the festivities into August. The time will be packed with a combination of features that have been popular with festival guests — the weekday morning seminars, the Sunday morning coffee concerts, the outdoor Wintergreen Summer Music Academy performances — and new offerings, including premieres of fresh compositions and different approaches to familiar music.

For instance, many listeners will be familiar with W.A. Mozart’s string quartets, but how often does one get to hear them at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello? This year’s Wintergreen at Monticello series will offer a July 14 appearance by an Italian saxophone quartet, Quartetto di Sassofoni Accademia, plus performances on July 21 and 28 that include both Mozart quartets and newer compositions.

Another Monticello link this year is a series of Mediterranean wine tastings on July 9, 16, 23 and 30 and Aug. 6 that pays tribute to Filippo Mazzei, a friend who shared the third president’s dreams of establishing vineyards in Virginia.

Smith said the variety of events helps keep the festival fresh each year and offers more directions in which creative connections can occur.

“They happen in kind of a similar pattern every year, but they’re totally different,” Smith said.

Smith even will step in as guest conductor on July 8 and 9 to lead the U.S. premiere of one of his own compositions, “Concerto for Soprano Saxophone and String Orchestra.”

This year’s Wintergreen Summer Music Academy will team up 32 instrumentalists with seven young composers. The student composers will write works for their instrumentalist peers, and the resulting seven pieces will be premiered and recorded during the festival, Smith said.

And fans of the academy’s Music in Unusual Places series, which has taken musicians in past seasons everywhere from the Blue Ridge Overlook to Nelson County’s farmers’ market, can find this year’s performers at two overlooks, in the Mountain Inn lobby and at nearby Three Ridges Depot and Deli in Nellysford, as well as other locations.

What was created to give the students a chance to experience performing outdoors and in other offbeat settings ended up becoming a popular outreach series that draws healthy crowds, Smith said.

“It’s not unusual for them to have 80 to 100 people showing up at the overlook,” Smith said.

Many popular offerings, such as the cooking classes, sell out quickly.

There’s no need to wait until the box office opens July 2 to get tickets. They’re already on sale online at www.wintergreenperformingarts.org