By David Allen | Visuals by Niki Chan Wylie
Reporting from Moab, Utah
Sept. 23, 2025
READ FULL ARTICLE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/arts/music/moab-music-festival.html
“It was an unusually moving few days, and it felt that way for deeper reasons than hearing beautiful music in a beautiful place. You can get that at plenty of summer festivals…It was realizing that the festival goes to such lengths because it knows that it can offer some of the purest, most intense listening experiences around.”
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“Something more is happening here — something that, as the river falls, temperatures rise and people decline to do all that much about either, ultimately feels quite profound.”
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“a satisfying range of music in a breathtaking range of spaces.”
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“the piano looked as if it were just one more natural feature in a part of the world that is already full of them. So powerful is the illusion that patrons sometimes ask if the piano lives there all the time.”
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“Nothing gets in the way of the music down there [in the grotto]… The acoustic is ludicrously good, so clear and bright and detailed that you quickly forget to think about it at all. You don’t so much feel close to the music as part of it.”