A week full of classical music kicks off at the Oyster Bay Music Festival

For the past 12 years, the Oyster Bay Music Festival has brought high-quality classical music to the North Shore. This year the concert series will run from June 23 to July 1.

The festival began at Christ Church and First Presbyterian Church in Oyster Bay. The churches reached out to music teacher Sarah Hoover, who contacted fellow musicians Pippa Borisy and Lauren Ausubel. The three agreed that they wanted to provide more opportunities for their students, and the North Shore in general, to hear live classical music.

“Why do people always have to travel to the city?” Ausubel, one of the festival’s three co-founders, said. “Why can’t we have things that are in unique venues out on Long Island, by us? We wanted to do something — not just a classical music festival, but something that would really bring people together in the community and show them that classical music is very approachable.”

For one week each year since then, the performers in the Oyster Bay Music Festival have come together, and have developed something of a cult following among a devoted audience. Performers of all ages and skills take part in the series.

The concerts showcase vocalists, pianists, strings and wind players, and the event has caught the attention of internationally known musicians. Pianist Maxim Lando, who started performing in the festival at age 9, will make his 12th appearance, this year with two friends from Europe who will also play: German violinist Tassilo Probst, and French-Viennese double bassist Marc-André Teruel. The three 20-year-old rising stars performed at this year’s International Classical Music Awards in Poland. Lando and Probst were awarded Chamber Music Album of the Year for their release “Into Madness,” and Teruel received the first ICMA Classeek Award.

Glen Head resident Christopher Lau, a bass-baritone, will be among the festival’s many performers. Lau, who earned a master’s in vocal performance at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, will make his ninth appearance in the Oyster Bay Festival.

“The festival has just been so important in my growth as a singer, because I’ve been in it basically every single year,” Lau said. “And it’s just so amazing seeing so much young talent all in the same places and unusual venues. It’s really cool that we have these really cool classical music concerts, and (we’re) taking them out of the concert hall and into the community.”

The concerts will variously feature operatic arias, Broadway numbers, solo piano and performances of movie theme music. One of this year’s theme, Borisy explained, will be introversion and extroversion, highlighting, among others, Robert Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius, the fictional characters he invented to symbolize the extremes of his own personality.

The concerts will take place at St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Cold Spring Harbor; Raynham Hall Museum, in Oyster Bay; Christ Church and Congregation L’Dor V’Dor, in Oyster Bay; the Nassau County Museum of Art, in Roslyn Harbor; St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Huntington; Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, in Manhasset; and the Cedarmere Estate of William Cullen Bryant, in Roslyn. All are free, and tickets will be required for only one, the June 27 concert at Cedarmere. Donations to help support the festival are gladly accepted.

“It’s such an enjoyable experience, because I think we really have kind of a family feel about us,” Ausubel said. “We’ve been together for so many years. The concerts are always infused with a lot of passion. It’s not a traditional concert, where people are sitting in a typical concert venue and musicians are dressed in black and white and there’s no speaking. We really engage with audiences, so it does break that barrier.”