There is a particular quality to the light at Chautauqua in late July — the way dusk comes in slowly off the lake, softening the edges of things, turning the old grounds golden just as the amphitheater fills. It is the kind of evening that seems assembled for a voice like Alison Krauss’s: one that carries over open air without effort, as though it requires nothing of the room except that the room stay quiet enough to listen.
Krauss brings Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas to Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater on Friday, July 24, at 7:30 PM — a stop on the Arcadia 2026 Tour, the band’s first full run together in over a decade. The occasion is Arcadia, released March 2025 on Down The Road Records, their eighth studio album and their first in fourteen years. Their previous record, Paper Airplane, won multiple Grammy Awards and topped Billboard’s country, bluegrass, and folk charts before the band stepped back from touring. Now they’re back — sixty-plus dates from April through October — and the album they’ve brought with them is worth the wait.
What Arcadia does is trust its own restraint. There are moments where Douglas’s Dobro rises out of the mix with a force that reminds you exactly why he is considered one of the instrument’s defining voices. Russell Moore of IIIrd Tyme Out joins as a new co-lead vocalist for this tour, adding harmonic depth to a group already built around the precision of their ensemble singing. Ron Block on banjo and guitar, Barry Bales anchoring the low end — this is a band that has spent decades learning to play behind a voice, and it shows.
The Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater seats 5,000 and is one of the more remarkable outdoor venues in western New York — an open-air structure on the grounds of a Victorian-era educational community that has drawn audiences to Chautauqua Lake for generations. It suits this kind of music: enough room for the sound to move, enough history in the grounds to feel like something is at stake.
Opening the evening is Theo Lawrence, a French-born, Austin-based singer-songwriter working from the classic country of the 1950s and ’60s, whose singles “California Poppy” and “Chérie” have built a growing international following. Arriving early is the right call.
Tickets run $75–$175 for single tickets and are also included with a Chautauqua gate pass. Buy tickets for Alison Krauss & Union Station at Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater →