On the evening of July 18, 1983, Joni Mitchell stopped mid-song, looked past the stage lights toward the hills behind the amphitheater, and pointed. A hot air balloon was drifting over the ridge, backlit by the last of the sunset, and for a moment the crowd forgot the music entirely and just watched it float. It is a small, perfect story for how this venue has always worked — the lake, the hills, and the show all competing for your attention at once. That night, the amphitheater was barely open. Today, more than four decades later, it is one of the great outdoor rooms in Upstate New York, and it is still doing exactly what it did for Joni Mitchell: getting out of the way and letting the Finger Lakes do some of the performing.
The Orchestra Built the Room
CMAC did not start as a rock venue. It started as an act of civic ambition by an orchestra that needed a summer home. In 1983, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra helped raise the funds to build an outdoor amphitheater on the campus of Finger Lakes Community College, in the town of Hopewell just east of Canandaigua — a partnership between the RPO, FLCC leadership, and Marvin Sands, the Canandaigua native who had built Canandaigua Wine Company (later Constellation Brands) into a beverage empire. The venue opened that year as the Finger Lakes Performing Arts Center — FLPAC on paper, “Fleepak” in conversation around Ontario County ever since — with roughly 2,700 seats under its open-air roof and lawn space for another 15,000 people on the hillside overlooking Canandaigua Lake. The idea was straightforward and, for a community college campus in the Finger Lakes, genuinely ambitious: build a real amphitheater, give the RPO a summer stage, and let the region’s scenery do the marketing.
Fleepak’s Early Years
It did not take long for FLPAC to prove it could hold more than an orchestra. Eric Clapton played the amphitheater on June 23, 1985. Whitney Houston brought her Moment of Truth World Tour through on July 7, 1987, one stop in a run that also carried her through Lake Placid and Providence that same week. Bob Dylan became one of the venue’s most consistent visitors, returning multiple times between 1988 and 2011, including a stop on July 25, 1989. For a facility built primarily to house a regional symphony’s summer season, this was an unusually fast education in what a touring rock and pop circuit could do for a small-market amphitheater — and it set the pattern FLPAC, and later CMAC, would follow for the next forty years: classical music by day, arena-caliber headliners by night, and a lawn full of people who drove in from Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse to see both.
Dave and the Jam Generation
No artist’s relationship with this stage tells the story better than Dave Matthews. The full Dave Matthews Band played FLPAC three times in the 1990s — August 25, 1995; June 5, 1997; and August 3, 1999 — years when the band was still building the word-of-mouth touring base that would eventually make them one of the biggest live acts in America. The 1995 show closed with an encore run of “Improv Jam,” “Drive In, Drive Out,” and “Tripping Billies,” the kind of extended, audience-taping-friendly set that defined the band’s rise on the jam-scene circuit of that era. Matthews never really left. Once his touring slowed to smaller-scale runs, he and guitarist Tim Reynolds turned the venue into a near-annual acoustic stop, playing CMAC as a duo in 2012, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2022 — a three-decade arc from full-band jam sets to stripped-down evenings on the same hillside.
The broader jam and improvisational-rock scene followed the same path to Canandaigua. The Allman Brothers Band and Widespread Panic co-headlined a show on August 22, 2009, and Phish played the amphitheater on June 29, 2010 — both bands part of the same touring ecosystem that made CMAC’s lawn a regular late-summer destination for fans willing to drive out from the Northeast’s jam corridor for a night on the Finger Lakes.
A New Name, A New Shell
By the early 2000s, FLPAC needed more than a fresh coat of paint. Between 2005 and 2006, the venue underwent a $13.5 million renovation, privately funded largely through the sale of 54 elevated luxury boxes, that rebuilt the covered seating from 2,700 to 5,000 seats, added new sound and lighting systems, and reconfigured the lawn to hold roughly 10,000 more — a total capacity of about 15,000 that has held steady ever since. When the renovated venue reopened, it did so under a new name: the Constellation Brands–Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center, honoring Marvin Sands, who had died in 1999, through the naming gift of the beverage company he founded. CMAC — the initials stuck instantly — became the venue’s permanent identity going forward, even as longtime regulars kept calling it Fleepak out of habit.
Country Comes to the Lake
The renovated shed also became one of the region’s most reliable stops on the country touring circuit. Kenny Chesney played CMAC repeatedly through the 2000s and 2010s — with LeAnn Rimes opening on July 22, 2008; with Billy Currington and Uncle Kracker on August 24, 2011; and with the Eli Young Band and a then-rising Kacey Musgraves on August 21, 2013. Classic rock kept its own foothold on the calendar, too: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played CMAC on July 2, 2017, with The Who’s Roger Daltrey following two weeks later on July 16, 2017 — a summer that stacked two generations of arena-rock royalty onto the same Finger Lakes stage within fourteen days of each other.
Still the Orchestra’s Home
Through every renovation, rename, and rock booking, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra never left. CMAC remains the RPO’s summer home, and the orchestra’s outdoor programming — including its long-running “Red, White, and Boom!” concert, complete with fireworks over the lake — continues to anchor the venue’s early-summer calendar; the RPO’s July 2, 2025 return marked its first appearance at CMAC since 2021, a homecoming for the ensemble that helped build the place in the first place. Today the amphitheater is booked through Live Nation and managed day to day by ASM Global, but the arrangement Marvin Sands and the RPO struck in 1983 — an orchestra’s summer stage that also happens to be one of the best amphitheaters in the state for a touring rock or country bill — has never really changed. Forty-some years on, the hills behind the stage still catch the sunset, the lake is still right there, and somewhere in the Finger Lakes, someone still calls it Fleepak.
Photo Credits
- Photo: Daniel Christensen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
- Photo: J. Passepartout / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
