Quad City Bank & Trust (QCBT) announced today they are renewing their sponsorship of the Quad City Bank & Trust Riverfront Pops Concert for five more years.
2026 marks the final year in the current sponsorship contract with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO).
Representatives from QCBT and the QCSO jointly announced Wednesday, Aug. 5 that they have secured an agreement extending the sponsorship through 2031.
The QCBT Riverfront Pops Concert has been dubbed, “The party of the summer,” in the QC area, averaging between 4,000 and 5,000 in attendance. Extending its 15-year title sponsorship, Laura “Divot” Ekizian, QCBT’s president & CEO, said Wednesday at the event home at Davenport’s LeClaire Park that Riverfront Pops “is like nothing else around."
"We take great pride in knowing our sponsorship allows access to all who wish to attend to enjoy a top-notch cultural experience right here in the Quad Cities on our beautiful riverfront,” she said.
“We couldn't be more thrilled to support the Quad City Symphony Orchestra with this event and in so
many other ways,” Ekizian said on the park bandshell.
“We’re pretty excited for what this means for the Quad-City community. What we’re doing with this event is more than just putting Quad City Bank & Trust on the concert title. We are committing to what the Quad City Symphony Orchestra does day in and day out, more than just one night, which is so wonderful, she said. “We’re on the river, we get to join together as a community and witness the talent of these musicians that are in our community living every day,” Ekizian said.
“That’s one of the perks of being a sponsor of this event, but the other real benefit is what we do with the symphony orchestra throughout the year because we sponsor this event,” she said.
“And by keeping ticket prices affordable, not only for the pops concert, but keeping it accessible for the Youth Symphony and musicians of all ages to participate in the symphony, is really important to the symphony.”
“And I can tell you that for 15 years while we've been a partner with the symphony, we also partner with so many worthy community organizations that make the Quad Cities a special place to be in,” the CEO said. “And as Quad City Bank & Trust, we feel very committed to making sure the Quad Cities remains a wonderful community to live and work in.”
QCBT’s sponsorship not only provides underwriting needed to present this concert to the community at an affordable ticket price making it an accessible experience for all, it also provides vital funding to support QCSO’s many impactful music education programs in the community, orchestra executive director Brian Baxter said.
With this sponsorship, QCSO is not only to physically expand the bandshell stage to accommodate all the performers, but it's able to expand its educational reach within the community, he noted.
Last year, music education programs served more than 30,000 students locally. Programs such as Symphony Day provided free access to concerts for students and their families throughout numerous school districts in our area.
“Our partnership with Quad City Bank & Trust helps to make Riverfront Pops one of the Quad Cities’ favorite summer traditions,” Baxter said Wednesday. “Together, we bring people together through music, creating connections and strengthening the community spirit that makes this region such a special place to call home.
"We welcome thousands of people to come together and enjoy the musical splendor of our professional QCSO musicians, guest artists, and we also are proud to feature our Youth Symphony just prior to the main show," he said. "We round out the night with our traditional performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, set to a brilliant fireworks finale. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be on a warm August night.”
“We've had a really wonderful partnership for 15 years with Quad City Bank and Trust, and this partnership, continuing it for another five years, will make a big difference in our ability to produce the high-level, professional, exciting quality of concert that we do for Riverfront Pops,” Baxter added. “And the sponsorship also helps to boost and support a lot of our education programs throughout the year, such as Symphony Day and others that are really important to the community.”
“It means so much to our ability to put on these programs. We need support; our ticket revenue all year long does not fully support what we do, which is why we do a lot of fundraising,” Baxter said. “We have sponsorships, we seek grants, we seek donations.”
“Education is so critical to everything. I think I'm probably preaching to the choir just saying that, but specifically for us, music education. You learn things in music education that you don't learn anywhere else in school, which is why it's a critical part of what students are able to engage in at school,” he said. “Our programs, our youth ensemble programs, which serve 250 students, our private lesson programs, which serve now over 350 students, those are really important pieces of what we deliver for the community every day, and they are meant to pair with and support what public school teachers are doing in the schools.
“You have so much better outcomes in your community if you're a community that supports music education,” Baxter noted. “It creates civically engaged people, people who care about the community, people who know how to collaborate, to partner, sometimes to lead, sometimes to follow. I mean, you learn all these things when you play in an orchestra, when you play in band or you sing in a choir.”
Music of The Who to offer another special night
This year’s event on Saturday, Aug. 22 will feature The Best of The Who (whose large catalog includes “Pinball Wizard,” “My Generation,” “Who Are You” and “I Can See For Miles”) featuring guest artists Jeans 'N Classics and conductor Hisham Bravo Groover.
“It's gonna be a great show,” Baxter said. “Part of picking these concerts is having music and songs that really lend themselves well to a symphonic version of them. You know, in past years I can think of Led Zeppelin, which was a really great one, Journey.
"We've done all kinds of concerts, and The Who is right up there in caliber of song. Like, the songs are great. There's really an orchestral feel to them, and so I think the audience is really gonna like what they hear when they get them with the band paired with the full orchestra as well, so it'll be a lot of fun.”
Groover -- director of the QCSO’s youth ensembles, assistant conductor of QCSO, and assistant professor of music and director of orchestral studies at Augustana College – will lead his third Riverfront Pops.
The QCSO is preceded at 6:30 p.m. with about 25 minutes from the Youth Symphony Orchestra, including the flying theme from “E.T.,” and Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute.”
Groover said Wednesday he likes the variety of the Riverfront Pops program.
“I'm relatively young, so I get to be exposed deeply to music of bands that I knew a little bit about but didn't know too much about,” he said of The Who. “So now I'm immersing myself obviously in The Who and learning what an amazing history they had and impact they had in rock and roll and in the '60s. So I like the personal aspect of me learning these things like I did with Led Zeppelin, Chicago, and all these other bands. But I do love the fact that we feature our students.
“Anytime that we can give them additional performance opportunities, whether they be playing for a specific— like this coming year we're going to be playing at First Presbyterian in Davenport,” Groover said. “Just going to different aspects, different places in our community to highlight the amazing things that they're doing, that's what I really like."
He appreciates the Pops for financially supporting student education.
“Obviously, it helps us by allowing us to provide not only our students directly that are involved in our program, but the broader community with access to many, many educational opportunities,” Groover said. “We have hundreds of school visits a year where we send musicians, myself, to as many schools as we can to give those school band and orchestra programs additional help, to help those teachers.
"I mean, they're already doing amazing things and they need some help sometimes. The impact that Quad City Bank & Trust has in giving us some of that financial strength to, like I said, to be able to provide those programs is just amazing.”
Impact on QCBT
Ekizian, a 26-year QCBT veteran, said Riverfront Pops is a special networking event for clients and staff.
“It’s delivery of a brand promise. Not just for the people we invite, because we can't invite every single client we have, so we try to make sure the event itself is worthy of this community, because then we're delivering on our brand promise,” she said. “So when we commit to something like this, we really want to make sure it benefits the community as a whole. Then we know we're having the impact we want. And anything less than that is not worth our dollars or our time or anyone else's. And the symphony delivers.
“I think every community partner we work with delivers,” Ekizian said. “It's the metric we use to make sure we're using our money wisely for the causes that make sense. And we try to make sure we're doing things that are quality of life enhancements as well as those that either serve a need or solve a problem or lift others up in our community. So we're trying to get it on all fronts.”
Riverfront Pops (a 40-year-plus QC tradition) is important to support, as one of the area’s “quality of life events,” she said. “These are things that make you proud to live in your community, and they're things that make you feel part of a community.”
“Whether it's the United Way or Madison School or all the things that we do in the community that really help to solve a need. Those are just as important, but we want to make sure we all feel good about living here,” Ekizian added.
“The more that we do that, the more people will want to support the things that need our money at the time to solve something too. It's multifaceted to us, and we're lucky enough to be in a position as a bank after all these years where we are able to support so many worthy organizations at a meaningful level and have an impact. When we were first growing as a bank, that wasn't always the case. case, and this was the dream. Being able to do these type of things was really the mission we were under.”
A St. Ambrose alum, Ekizian added that QCBT will likely contribute to support the planned $24-million music education facility and concert hall that SAU and QCSO are partnering to build in downtown Davenport.
“They're doing it right. They are going to model what collaboration looks like in the Quad Cities,” she said. “We all know living in the Quad Cities isn't easy. We have 2 states, 4 cities, multiple counties. We have to collaborate, and this is going to be an example of how that can work. And we want to be able to support that, and I hope the whole community will show up and support that.”
“We are in the fundraising phase, so we are reaching out and having conversations with everybody from individuals to corporate sponsors to grantors,” Baxter said of the QCSO raising $12 million for the new center. “And so we're making a lot of great early progress in that campaign.”
Riverfront Pops tickets are available for purchase at qcso.org.
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