SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

Mostly Modern Festival (MMF) was born when classical music powerhouses Robert and Victoria Paterson (he’s a composer, she’s a violinist) were looking for a music festival that celebrated living composers with a full orchestra. Not finding any such festival that fit those criteria, the couple decided to create it themselves, and to do it in Saratoga Springs, in part because of its central location between New York City, Boston and Montreal. “Most classical music festivals primarily perform music by dead composers, with a few obligatory pieces by living composers thrown in, maybe,” says Robert. “Mostly Modern Festival flips that model and celebrates modern music, with occasional works from the past.” 

The Patersons, who split their time between New York City and Saratoga, launched their first-ever festival in 2018, and returned the following year for round two. Then—you know the story—the pandemic hit, silencing tubas and piccolos from Lincoln Center to the Sydney Opera House. This summer will mark the long-awaited return of MMF, which will present 12 performances throughout the month of June. 

Kicking things off is, well, a kick-off event featuring world-class opera singers and NYC instrumentalists coming together June 8 at Caffè Lena. The rest of the shows, which include three orchestra concerts and more than 30 world premieres, will take place between June 9 and June 24 at the Arthur Zankel Music Center. Of the 150 world-class musicians who will be featured in the 2022 festival, standouts include Austin Symphony conductor Peter Bay and Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director JoAnn Falletta, who will conduct the American Modern Orchestra in its final concert of the festival on June 24. The program for that not-to-be-missed evening is Aaron Copland’s Dance Symphony, Charles Griffes’ Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan, MMF’s own Robert Paterson’s Dark Mountains, and Christopher Rouse’s Flute Concerto featuring flutist Henrik Heide.

Speaking of all that classical music, are you one of those people who thinks the genre in general just isn’t for them? Think again. “Most people love classical music without even realizing it,” says Robert, who serves as MMF’s artistic director (Victoria is its executive director). “If you watch TV shows such as Succession or Downton Abbey, or movies directed by Steven Spielberg, and you like what you’re hearing, you are essentially listening to classical music.”

This past April, Saratoga-based trio Warden and Company released its first full-length album, an insanely catchy, sing-along-able 11-track folk/rock debut called Somewhere, to rave reviews. Critics especially loved the album’s title track, a duet by Warden and Co. frontman Seth Warden and his 13-year-old daughter, Ella, whose stage name is Lovella. But while there’s no question that the Maple Ave middle-schooler stole the show this time around, Ella has been influencing her father’s music since long before Lovella made her musical debut.

“My wife and I started having children, and as a musician I was being tortured by a lot of the television programming that was for children,” Warden says. We had The Wiggles and Teletubbies…The Teletubbies didn’t even speak! And the music was very silly. I was like, why don’t they make music that’s a little more universal?” So the musician wrote a children’s album, and the band Seth and the Moody Melix—made up of Warden, Doug Moody and Brian Melick—was born. 

Fast forward a few years, and the music Warden was writing began to change, again because of his children. “My kids were getting older and the kids that we were performing for were getting older, and it felt like the messages needed to change a bit,” says the vocalist and guitarist. “We started writing more adult-themed or world-themed music in the last couple of years, and it has been very gratifying.”

In 2019, Warden, Moody and Melick released their first EP as Warden and Co., but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that the new band really found its sound. “Those moments of downtime with the guitar sitting in the corner really proved to be fruitful as far as music and new material is concerned,” Warden, a middle school music teacher, says of the early days of COVID. “I wrote something like 26 songs over the pandemic and nine of those are on Somewhere.”

One such tune is “Somewhere (feat. Lovella).” “We originally thought I was going to sing on a different song, and I sang it and it just didn’t sound right,” Lovella says of the day the band recorded the album at Ballston Spa’s Millstone Studio. “And I was going through the songs in my head and I was like, ‘What about this one?’ And it just ended up working.” Warden adds: “When she started singing in the studio, the song instantly became better.”

So, will Saratoga hear more from Lovella, either on future Warden and Co. tracks or albums of her own? “A couple reviewers said they were hoping for another duet, and the two of us have started working on some music for her specifically,” Warden says. “So it’s completely inevitable.”