Enchanted Garden from Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite is one of the most rewarding pieces of music both for the listener and the musician. This is one of those pieces that we performed once and then just couldn’t stop performing. The music itself with the slow build and immersive final crescendo transports us. We couldn’t have imagined a more magical place to make music than the lush gardens and waterfalls surrounded by butterflies at the Thanksgiving Point Butterfly Biosphere. The story behind Ravel’s orchestrated fairy tale is that of the butterfly fairies who inhabit an Enchanted Garden. Each morning at dawn, the fairies flutter around the garden waking the flowers to remind them to open up to the light. The beautiful irony is that for this video shoot it was our students who were going about waking the butterflies. We arrived at the biosphere before dawn dressed in our white tuxedos and flowers ready to record, but the butterflies are generally not active until later in the morning when the air is warmer and the flowers are open — so we played their music and by the end of the filming we were surrounded by butterflies! The combination of such immersive music and the beautiful surroundings transported us and hopefully captures the essence of Ravel’s incredible music.

For the past several years we have performed at the Thanksgiving Point Ashton Gardens as part of their annual Tulip Festival and previously recorded our Simple Gifts video in the gardens. If you are ever in Utah County, don’t miss an opportunity to stop at the gardens. If you can’t catch our concert, maybe you can at least catch a butterfly!