What is Arizona Musicfest?
In 1991 a handful of residents in the far north of Scottsdale and Carefree — a landscape of new golf communities and unpaved roads — decided their corner of the desert should have a music festival. They put on four chamber concerts in a week. Thirty-five years later, Arizona Musicfest presents 30 to 50 concerts a season to around 50,000 people, making it one of the biggest performing-arts presenters in the Valley — and it still does it in North Scottsdale, in the sanctuaries of Highlands Church, Pinnacle Presbyterian, and La Casa de Cristo.
The programming is deliberately broad. The 2026–27 season opens with a staged Man of La Mancha in October and runs through Broadway stars (Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Jeremy Jordan, Joshua Henry), classical heavyweights (violinist Gil Shaham), crossover (Bill Murray with cellist Jan Vogler, Postmodern Jukebox, Michael Feinstein), and rock (the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward), closing with the Young Musicians spring concert in May.
The anchor is the Festival Orchestra: for one week each February, principal and section players from the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, and Philadelphia Orchestra fly in, rehearse, and play four concerts. It is, by a distance, the finest orchestra Arizona hears in a year, and it plays in a church off Pinnacle Peak Road.
Navigating a season
Know the venues. Highlands Church (Pinnacle Peak Road at Pima) is the flagship — about 1,600 seats, good acoustics for a sanctuary, and where nearly every headliner plays. Pinnacle Presbyterian (Pima north of Happy Valley) and La Casa de Cristo (Bell Road) host chamber and smaller concerts. They are miles apart along the same corridor; check the ticket. Musicals and a few specials sometimes go to Phoenix venues like the Herberger.
Buy in tiers. Headliner tickets go on sale in late summer and the big names sell out — McDonald and Chenoweth will. The Festival Orchestra’s four concerts are the classical core; buy the set. Chamber and Young Musicians concerts are cheap and often the best value on the calendar.
Parking and timing. Church lots are large but fill for sell-outs; arrive 30 minutes early. Concerts are typically 7:30 p.m. with some matinees. North Scottsdale’s restaurants in Kierland, Grayhawk, and along Pinnacle Peak Road are the pre-show options; Pinnacle Peak and Troon dining is closest to Highlands.
Beyond the concerts. The “Music Alive!” series runs 160-plus lectures, classes, and salon events for adults through the season, many free, and the Young Musicians program — competition, mentoring, and a spring showcase — is the organization’s quiet mission. The box office at 7950 E. Thompson Peak Parkway is open weekdays.
How a chamber week became a season
Musicfest’s founding generation was the north Scottsdale that predated the Loop 101: retirees and second-home owners in Troon, Pinnacle Peak, and Carefree who had moved from cities with orchestras and found the desert culturally quiet. The 1991 festival — four concerts in a week — was their answer, modeled on the summer chamber festivals of the mountain West. For its first two decades it stayed small and serious, adding the Young Musicians Competition in the late 1990s as a way to invest in Arizona students.
The transformation came under Allan Naplan, an opera and orchestra administrator who arrived as executive and producing director in 2013. His strategy was to keep the classical core — the Festival Orchestra residency, chamber concerts — and surround it with headliners who could fill 1,600 seats: Broadway voices, jazz and pop legends, crossover acts. The bet was that North Scottsdale’s winter population, wealthy and older and largely unwilling to drive to downtown Phoenix at night, would support a full season close to home. The numbers say it did: from 27 concerts and 30,000 attendees in 2019–20 to roughly 50 concerts and nearly 51,000 in 2025–26.
The venue choice is a story in itself. North Scottsdale has no concert hall, but it has churches built during the 2000s boom with sanctuaries the size of theaters. Musicfest rents them, adds production, and turns Sunday-morning rooms into Saturday-night halls. It’s a pragmatic model that other suburban presenters have copied.
Where it sits in the city’s culture
Scottsdale’s arts infrastructure is concentrated downtown — the Civic Center, SMoCA, the Center for the Performing Arts, the galleries of the ArtWalk. Musicfest is the counterweight twenty miles north: a full season for the half of the city that lives above Shea, run by a nonprofit with a genuine education mission. When the Festival Orchestra tunes up in Highlands Church in late February, with the McDowells outside the windows and a concertmaster borrowed from Lincoln Center, the founders’ 1991 idea — that this place deserved real music — has been thoroughly vindicated.