Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Brandon Lawhead had a little help from an NFL legend in promoting the upcoming Austin Symphony Orchestra concert, which will be held at the First United Methodist Church at 2 p.m. Sunday.

To promote the concert, Lawhead worked with Brett Favre to create a one-minute video encouraging people to come out and watch the performance. Favre, who Lawhead met during a Wrangler interview, also takes a playful jab at Lawhead during the promo.

The concert will feature Lawhead, a local lawyer and violinist, performing Vivaldi’s “Winter.”

Lawhead said the concert will provide a much needed boost for anyone struggling with seasonal blues, or social isolation.

“It does help our mood and it helps your brain health, and emotional well being. The notion of getting with other people is important,” Lawhead said. “We are now more isolated as a society than we ever have been. Community orchestras or good things and they are something the communities need to support. They benefit the players who are playing, and also the people who are attending.”

Lawhead said that interest in classical music is on the rise in the younger generation and Sunday’s concert would be a great chance to see that music played live.

“Being in front of screens so much these days gets us all a little bit angry and uptight and a concert like we will be providing is going to be the anecdote to that,” Lawhead said. “You’ll see family, friends and neighbors. The music has a medicinal quality that will help, because we’re an angry society right now.”

The promo video with Favre includes footage of Lawhead during a flag football game that he organized for Favre’s Hall of Fame induction in Green Bay and it also includes the music of Lawhead’s brother Blair Lawhead playing violin with Lucy Simon on the guitar during a Broadway adaptation of Little House on the Prairie. Lawhead received the recording from Carly Simon recently.

Lawhead was born and raised in Austin, Minnesota. He received his musical education from his father, Donaldson V. Lawhead, and his brother, Blair Lawhead, in addition to instruction from Susan J. Radloff, and Philip Burkhart.

Lawhead was recognized as top violinist in the Minnesota Orchestra’s Young People’s Symphony Concert Association Competition.

Lawhead attended St. Olaf College, where he graduated cum laude in 1993, and was inducted into Phi Alpha Thera (historical honor society). Legendary St. Olaf Orchestra conductor, Steven Amundson, noted that Lawhead received the highest honors that could be bestowed upon a musician at St. Olaf and opined that Lawhead was “one of the finest violinists to attend St. Olaf during my 40 years on the faculty.”