You know you’re middle‑aged when you can recall a handful of superior concert experiences the like of which you have little hope of seeing being equaled in the future. My top concert memories tend to center on the New York Philharmonic, where I worked in the 1980s as a publicist. They include, but are not limited to, Mstislav Rostropovich performing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations and the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto on the same program, Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony,” and conductor Pierre Boulez making transparent Debussy’s hitherto seemingly dense “Jeux.”

But there is another concert experience that sticks out in memory for a very different reason. The piece was Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night,” and the performers were a sextet of string players assembled from the participants in the Grand Canyon Music Festival. (I can’t recall the year, but it was sometime in the late 1990s.) “Transfigured Night” is a late Romantic piece that pulls at the emotions as if the soul were taffy, and can leave you feeling dissolved as if into a million atoms.

I stepped outside during intermission into the Sunday afternoon sunshine with the profound feeling that the sextet had achieved Schoenberg’s objective of dissolution. When the piece ended, I left the concert at dusk.

And there was the Grand Canyon.

And suddenly I was a single entity again.

Art and nature commonly used to be paired in discussions of the arts. Both offered beauty, the first attributed to humanity, the second attributed to God, or Evolution–or both–depending on one’s viewpoint. Today, with technology playing such a large and ubiquitous a role in the arts, with most of our music and images delivered to us via digital media, art is sufficiently separated from nature in seemingly unrelated fashion. If you want to understand again how art and nature exist as siblings, listen to live music in a beautiful natural setting. Fortunately, the Grand Canyon Music Festival is on again this year, and while “Transfigured Night” is not on the schedule, an amazingly diverse and vital lineup of music is.

The festival begins Sept. 2 with a concert of music by Vivaldi, Mozart, Brahms and others featuring violinists Yulia Ziskel and Joe Deninzon, pianist Joy Cline Phinney, and festival co‑founder, flutist Clare Hoffman. Those four are joined Sept. 3 by festival co‑founder Robert Bonfiglio, harmonica, for a program that will include bluegrass, Cajun and Texas swing tunes side‑by‑side with less swinging stuff by Massenet, Falla and Sarasate. The harmonica rules completely Sept. 6, when Bonfiglio is joined by fellow harmonica virtuoso Rob Paparozzi (of “The Blues Brothers” fame) for an evening of jazz, rock, blues, folk and world music.

The eclectic festival reaches its peak of diversity Sept. 8, when the string quartet that calls itself Ethel plays music from its latest CD, preceded by a reading of new scores by young Native American composers. Ethel’s repertoire is not the usual Haydn‑to‑Shostakovich fare of most string quartets, but its own, original music. The program repeats Sept. 9, with Ethel doing a separate program Sept. 10.

The grand celebration concludes with the Miami String Quartet playing Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Ginastera, Schumann and Shostakovich over two nights, Sept. 15 and 16.

All concerts take place at the Shrine of the Ages on the Canyon’s South Rim. For more information, go to www.grandcanyonmusicfest.org or call (800) 997‑8285.

In concert

 And now for a shameless plug. Prescott percussionist Maria Flurry will perform a sneak preview of a new concerto Saturday, Aug. 26, at Steinway of Phoenix, 14418 N. Scottsdale Rd. Admission to the 4 p.m. performance is free, and refreshments will be served afterward.

The concerto is called “Spaceflowers” and its composer is Yours Truly. I’ll be there to demonstrate my composition process, but more dramatically, Flurry will play excerpts on some of the dozens of western and world percussion instruments she owns. A pianist plays the piano, a flautist the flute (or is it the “flaut?”), but a percussionist must be able to play just about anything you can hit or strike.

This event was originally planned for earlier this summer, but had to be rescheduled. This time, it’s happening.

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