Michael Rossi.

In the summer months, classical music festivals usually take place far from South Florida, often in woodsy places like Aspen, Colo., or Marlboro, Vt.

That hasn’t stopped people from trying to get some summer concerts going; the Mainly Mozart Festival just wrapped this past weekend at the Knight Concert Hall to a very large audience, and soon the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival will return next month for its 23rd season of chamber music concerts.

But there’s still plenty of room for more, and that’s exactly what conductor Michael Rossi thought when he paid a visit to Miami, his wife’s hometown, last summer.

“I used to work for festivals in Italy, and after two years, I decided that I would like to open my own festival to provide better education to students without them having to pay large fees to get to Europe in the summers,” Rossi wrote Thursday afternoon in an email.

“My wife is from Miami, so when I was in town last summer, I noticed that there were no classical events, so I thought that it would be a great place to open,” he wrote. He reached out to Florida International University because the school had sent students to his previous festival and had been helpful with auditions. The school also agreed to sponsor the program by donating the Wertheim Performing Arts Center for performances.

Rossi then brought other musical professionals on board and announced the founding of the festival, calling for students who wanted to take part. “The response was overwhelming, with over 400 applications,” he wrote.

The festival has three separate institutes: one each for piano, opera and orchestra. The opera institute features master classes from the great American baritone Sherrill Milnes (long a Tampa-area resident); soprano Susan Neves and veteran Miami vocal coach Manny Perez; Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Caren Levine; and others. It includes three productions: Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute. FIU’s Robert Dundas is the stage director for the performances.

The orchestral institute includes readings of major works from the standard repertoire and several performances, the first of which was last week. The second performance is tonight and includes Dvorak’s Ninth on the first half and the Puccini Suor Angelica, a one-act, on its second half. On Saturday at the New World Center in Miami Beach, concerto competition winner Ryo Kaneko performs the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 on a program that also includes the Puccini opera and Richard Strauss’s Don Juan.

Nathalie Avila.

There are also chamber music performances, with Miami’s own Amernet String Quartet as artist in residence and Charleston Symphony concertmaster Yuriy Bekker as director. Next week at the Wertheim, the opera and orchestral institute students are heard in Magic Flute on July 2 and July 5, and Figaro on July 3 and July 6. Also on the evening of July 6, festival performers present an evening of selections from Spain’s national operetta tradition, the zarzuela.

Participants in the Piano Institute have been taking lessons with faculty members including the University of Miami’s Paul Posnak, Lynn University’s Lisa Leonard, and Reiko Shigoeka-Neriki of Indiana University, and there are master classes from eminent pianists Augustin Anievas and Santiago Rodriguez.

In short, it’s an ambitious, impressive effort that is already drawing audiences as well as students.

“Last week was our opening concert and we had a crowd of 200 people,” said Rossi, who began his professional career as a trumpeter for the Kennedy Center Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and made his conducting debut with the Washington National Opera in the 2010-11 season with Figaro. “The e-blast for the New World Center just went out a few hours ago and the tickets are going really fast, with the entire orchestra section already taken.”

About 150 students are taking part in the festival, and include international students from Russia, Serbia, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Poland, he wrote. “This is the first year of the festival and the results in all areas have been beyond anything I have expected,” he said.

Tonight’s concert at the Wertheim begins at 7:30 p.m. In addition to the student voices from the Opera Institute, soprano Nathalie Avila stars as Angelica in Puccini’s intensely emotional opera about a nun whose past life as an out-of-wedlock mother in an aristocratic family comes back to drive events to a tragic conclusion.

“Miami is already strong musically at other times in the year, and the Miami Summer Music Festival provides a new opportunity for performances and training in what is usually the ‘off-season,’” Rossi writes in his festival artistic director’s statement. “As you will hear in our performances, there is really no ‘off-season’ where talent is concerned. I am proud of what our students and faculty have achieved in this first year and am looking forward to our future in Miami.”

Tickets for tonight’s concert are $10; call 786-250-6042 or visit www.miamisummermusicfestival.com.