World premieres. Grammy-winning composers. Once-in-a-lifetime performances.

They’re not concepts often synonymous with the Twin Tiers, but the Endless Mountain Music Festival has been changing that.

“It’s live music that you’re not necessarily going to hear in the major cities, which are condemned to do all of the standard repertoire that everybody knows,” says Stephen Gunzenhauser, EMMF’s music director and conductor. “So, coming to Wellsboro, Mansfield, Corning is a unique experience for many people.”

Such exclusive performances during EMMF’s upcoming twentieth season include the state premiere of Nocturne, a classical nocturne for orchestra and piano composed by Grammy-winning songwriter Jimmy Webb, set for Friday, July 18, at Steadman Theatre on the campus of Commonwealth University at Mansfield in Mansfield. The next evening features the world premiere of AWAKE!, a five-movement concerto for orchestra and piano composed by Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Melissa Manchester on Saturday, July 19, at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning. Also slated for that night is hit singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka’s Manhattan Intermezzo. All three are being performed by world-class pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who helped bring two of the pieces to fruition.

“You just get struck by the muse,” says Jeffrey of commissioning such projects as AWAKE! and Nocturne. “Ideas kind of come to you. It’s always about the composer and what they may have that’s unique to bring to the world of piano and orchestra.”

Unique could describe involving Melissa, a hit pop singer and songwriter whose name recognition traces back to the 1970s. The two started communicating online during the covid pandemic, when Jeffrey would perform piano concerts live on YouTube from his living room. After a moving rendition of one of Beethoven’s sonatas, he learned of Melissa’s deep appreciation for classical music.

“I think that triggered something within me,” he says. “Because many times singer-songwriters have classical backgrounds, and then they just take the yellow brick road down a different route.”

AWAKE! is inspired by just that—a journey with an unknown outcome and the emotions evoked throughout it. Melissa says, “I wrote it according to several poems that I had treasured since I was a teenager, by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. They would literally sing to me. And so, when I was composing this, I would turn to these poems, and I would start to hear the music.”

The concerto’s world premiere will be another adventure, but this time, Melissa will skip the stage for a seat in the audience. There’s a chance she may surprise the attendees with one of her well-known hits, but this isn’t one of her normal pop concerts. Even so, her essence will be felt in each note.

“Each movement represents what one goes through in approaching an adventure,” she says of AWAKE!. “You start off in stillness, then trepidation, and you pray for strength. Then, you get the strength, and even though you’re feeling fear, you carry on. Even when you have your courage, it doesn’t mean that the universe doesn’t provide you with obstacles along the way to see how grounded you are.”

Finally, just as Melissa felt at the conclusion of her inaugural concerto-composing venture, “You come out of your journey and your trials and tribulations with new knowledge, with new lessons learned. It’s all hard-won gains.”

With a successful career spanning five decades, Melissa is no stranger to trials and tribulations, but most of all, triumph. She’s had chart-topping solo hits like the Grammy-nominated “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” “Midnight Blue” that peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 1975, and “You Should Hear How She Talks About You,” which earned her the 1983 Grammy for Best Pop Female Vocal Performance, beating out the likes of Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John.

On her twenty-fifth studio album, 2024’s Re:View, Melissa re-recorded “Midnight Blue” with Dolly Parton, and “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend’” with Kenny Loggins. The two originally co-wrote the Loggins-Stevie Nicks duet in 1979. Melissa has also scored music for Disney, appeared on acclaimed shows like General Hospital and The Muppet Show, and performed in the 2007 Chicago production of HATS! The Musical and the 2023 national tour of the Broadway musical Funny Girl.

“To be in this moment, at this advanced stage of a career and still having wonderful adventures is really something. The fact that it [my career] has endured for more than fifty years is really special to me,” she says, adding, “The thing about being an artist is you make a living by living your life, and that is rare. In this moment that we are in, art is more important than ever to help people, by bringing comfort to them, illuminating something, elevating something, educating something.”

That encapsulates the spirit of the Endless Mountain Music Festival.

“The goal is to make it [the music] accessible to all, and especially to Tioga County and our surrounding areas that are underserved artistically,” says Cindy Long, EMMF’s executive director since the festival’s inception twenty years ago. Accessibility is the key word, as EMMF hosts its concerts in a variety of venues—from traditional concert halls, museums, libraries, YMCAs, and even state parks—in Pennsylvania’s rural Tioga and Potter counties and in the Corning area. In addition, ticket prices haven’t changed since the festival’s beginnings, with some performances offered free of charge each season.

Jeffrey, who’s very much engrained in EMMF’s past, present, and future, is helping to harness that mold-breaking spirit this season. “I’ve known Stephen [Gunzenhauser] since the 1990s. We performed together when he was music director of the Lancaster Symphony, and we stayed in touch over the years,” says Jeffrey, who lent his talent on piano to the Pennsylvania premiere of Peter Boyer’s Rhapsody in Red, White and Blue during EMMF’s 2024 season. “After that, Stephen and I discussed doing some other unique programming.”

In addition to Melissa’s AWAKE!, Jeffrey also commissioned Jimmy Webb’s Nocturne, an orchestra and piano nocturne that’s only been performed live twice before.

Jeffrey explains that Nocturne means night piece, and that in it, “he [Jimmy] reflects sounds of the night from the moon, to dancing in the breeze, to animal life. So, it’s kind of a piece that evokes or ignites sounds of the night. He really embraces his classical roots and the classical soul.” Jeffrey will perform the nocturne’s Pennsylvania premiere on piano during the opening night of EMMF’s season.

Jimmy, the only artist ever to receive Grammy awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, has penned platinum hits such as Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Wichita Lineman,” “All I Know” from Art Garfunkel’s debut solo album, and most famously, “MacArthur Park,” first recorded by Richard Harris in 1967, when it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. For that single, Jimmy earned two Grammys—in 1969 for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) for Harris’s version and in 1970 for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group for Waylon Jennings’s version. The song peaked again in 1978 with Donna Summers’s disco version, which topped the Billboard charts at number one. Under his belt, Jimmy has a multitude of other awards and collaborations with Michael Feinstein, Linda Ronstadt, the 5th Dimension, the Supremes, and Carly Simon.

The music of Neil Sedaka, another name with recognizable hits from the 1960s and ’70s, also joins the EMMF repertoire this year with his nineteen-minute piano/orchestra concerto, Manhattan Intermezzo, with Jeffrey on piano. The piece debuted on Neil’s solo album, 2012’s The Real Neil, recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Over his legendary career, Neil has written or co-written more than 500 songs, such as “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” with his popularity solidified in the mid-1970s with Billboard Hot 100 number one hits “Laughter in the Rain” and “Bad Blood.”

Jeffrey, who will perform the piece, did not commission Neil’s intermezzo, but did bring him into the EMMF family. The two had the same piano teacher at the Juilliard School in New York City, though twenty years apart. EMMF’s promise to bring such unexpected performances to the area is what keeps not only audiences coming back, but artists as well. Stephen says that’s why he focuses on creating thrilling and unusual programming that draws top talent.

“If we were any other festival, we would be paying a great deal of money for our soloists and for the orchestra, but we are not. As a result, we have to rely upon something else, which is providing a really thrilling or wonderful experience for the musicians to come to enjoy the area. They’re in a situation which is not stressful, like in the major cities,” he says.

“The problem for me in the United States is that we always look to Germany or Russia for famous composers, and we keep doing them over and over again. But, we really do have a lot to offer, in this case, with Melissa Manchester, Jimmy Webb, and Neil Sedaka. These are wonderfully gifted, talented musicians that should be heard.”

For more information on the Endless Mountain Music Festival, its 2025 season program, or to purchase tickets, visit endlessmountain.net. Ticket prices vary for each show, with several being free of charge this season. The July 18 and 19 shows are $39 per ticket, flex passes for any six shows are $150, or season passes for all seventeen shows are $250.