Summer Concert Series: Hartford Steel Symphony

Join us for an outdoor concert featuring music from Hartford Steel Symphony! This concert will take place on the beautiful CMCH lawn. Grounds are open for seating and picnicking from 5 PM, and music is from 6PM-7:30PM. All of the CMCH outdoor concerts are free and open to the public. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own lawn chairs and food, and a food truck will be available onsite. In case of rain, the concerts will move indoors to our auditorium. All our summer concerts will be livestreamed to our YouTube Channel.

About the Band

Hartford Steel Symphony was founded in 1989 in Hartford and has become the area’s premier steel band. Kelvin Griffith, the band’s director, is well-known in Trinidad as a panist, or steel drum player. Griffith is also a maker of steel drums, and all the steel drums in the band are made by him. The steel pans reflect other instrument names based on the kind of sound they make—like cello, bass, guitar, and tenor pan.

Hartford Steel plays a wide variety of musical genres specific to the West Indies, including soca, calypso, and reggae, and also can play pop, classical, gospel, and jazz, all arranged to reflect the rhythms of the islands. The band’s members have competed in years of steel band competitions—part of the culture of steel band performance in the Caribbean—and can always be found at the annual Taste of the Caribbean festival, and at the West Indian Independence Celebration and Parade in Hartford, as well as West Indian independence celebrations around New England. Hartford Steel Symphony has also played with The Hartford Symphony Orchestra and celebrities like Bernadette Peters and Len “Boogsie” Sharp, one of the steel drums’ greatest panists.

Our Summer Concert Series is funded through the support of the Evelyn W. Preston Memorial Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee; the Connecticut Office of the Arts/DECD; and the National Endowment for the Arts.