The Festival at Sandpoint: Classical Music in a Town of Five Thousand
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
In nineteen eighty-two, a small group of volunteers in a city of five thousand people decided they wanted to bring symphonic music to north Idaho. They formed a nonprofit, raised some money, and in nineteen eighty-three presented the first Festival at Sandpoint, an outdoor concert series on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. The setting was the draw: a lakefront venue with the Selkirk Mountains behind the stage and the open water behind the audience, one of the more visually striking outdoor concert locations in the country.
What began as a mission to bring classical music to a region without a concert hall has expanded in the forty-plus years since to include jazz, blues, folk, and popular music alongside its original classical programming. The festival has hosted nationally known artists from country, rock, and folk, alongside symphony orchestras and chamber ensembles. It runs during the last week of July and the first week of August each year, timed to catch the brief north Idaho summer before the mountain snows return.
The Festival at Sandpoint has become a cornerstone of the arts in north Idaho and a long-running summer concert series in the Pacific Northwest. It is the kind of cultural institution that small mountain towns are not supposed to have, and that Sandpoint built from nothing, with volunteers.
