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Festival Napa Valley seemed a little closer to Kansas when Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena hosted an outdoor screening of The Wizard of Oz with live accompaniment by Festival Orchestra Napa on July 16. A sold-out audience of 1,100 gathered to watch the beloved Technicolor tale of Dorothy and friends with a full orchestral score conducted by Ming Luke

The 20th century is littered with the corpses of high-minded comic operas. Satire is what closes on Saturday night, said George S. Kaufman, whose witticism has passed into theater folklore. Fearlessly, composer Jake Heggie and his long-time librettist Gene Scheer took up the challenge with The Judgment of Paris — it was the exclamation point of Festival Napa Valley’s 20th anniversary season.

Festival Napa Valley (FNV), a music-centric charity organization that funds arts initiatives in the valley, marked its 20th anniversary this year, capping off over two weeks of performances with $6.5 million raised at its capstone event, the Arts for All Gala.

If Festival Napa Valley’s Symphonic Finale was a poker hand, it would have been a royal flush. Presented Sunday, July 19, at the FNV Stage at Charles Krug in St. Helena, the late evening program featured the works of a quintet of American compositional royalty performed by Festival Orchestra Napa under the guidance of conductor JoAnn Falletta.

Fleming returned to Festival Napa Valley with Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, a multimedia concert inspired by her 2023 Grammy Award-winning album. Accompanied by an original film curated by the National Geographic Society and the Pacific Symphony under conductor Alexander Shelley, the program wove Romantic-era art songs by Grieg, Liszt, Fauré and Hahn together with works by contemporary composers Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw and Kevin Puts.

What soprano Lisa Delan brought to Festival Napa Valley this year was termed a classical cabaret and not the song recital format in which she’s been featured in past summers. It was a welcome discovery for all.

Festival Napa Valley celebrated its 20th year with the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s “Judgment of Paris” opera at Charles Krug winery in St. Helena, CA on July 18, 2026. Most operas are written to be repertory items, performed in one theater this year and somewhere else the next. But “The Judgment of Paris,” the ebullient and delightful new comic one-act by San Francisco composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, is so resolutely site-specific that its world premiere on Saturday, July 18, at the Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena practically counts as an art installation. 

Festival Napa Valley marked its 20th anniversary with an Arts for All Gala on July 12 at Nickel & Nickel in Oakville, which raised an unprecedented $6.5 million for the festival’s year-round education, scholarship and community programs. The evening brought together philanthropists, artists, vintners and civic leaders, including House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.

On July 10, under the setting sun at Charles Krug Winery, guests were treated to an inspired program led by conductor Stephanie Childress, from Beethoven to a thrilling symphonic celebration of American classics by Bob Dylan and Billy Joel. The Young People’s Chorus of New York City also performed composer Gordon Getty’s Young America, with artistic direction by Francisco J. Nuñez, and the audience was enraptured by the world premiere of Michael Thurber’s concerto As I Breathe performed by Time for Three.