Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

Our 50th season begins with the highly anticipated return of violinist Cho-Liang Lin and the Festival debut of violist Yura Lee, both of whom join Cleveland Orchestra Principal Cellist Mark Kosower in one of the most brilliant works for string trio ever written.

Inon Barnatan—hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most admired pianists of his generation”—plays his own arrangements of Schumann’s Bach-influenced Six Études in Canonic Form and Rachmaninoff’s final major work: the wonderfully original and deeply personal Symphonic Dances.

In this single-work recital, Paul Appleby, one of the world’s most in-demand tenors, and acclaimed pianist Laura Poe perform a crown jewel of the piano-vocal repertoire: Schubert’s landmark song cycle Die schöne Müllerin.

This powerhouse program opens with pianists Gilles Vonsattel and Inon Barnatan playing two works for duo pianos—Debussy’s En blanc et noir and Stravinsky’s own arrangement of his ballet The Rite of Spring—and it closes with Brahms’s sunny String Quintet in G Major.

Cho-Liang Lin and Mark Kosower play Ravel’s lean and animated Sonata for Violin and Cello, written in tribute to Debussy, and a new piano quintet by the celebrated and eclectic composer Ryan Chase is the first of six Festival-commissioned works to be premiered this summer.

Renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine gives an all-Baroque recital featuring two of Bach’s immortal Partitas for Solo Violin and works by predecessors Westhoff and Biber that are revelations of early-Baroque virtuosity.

Ravel’s sparkling Introduction and Allegro opens this exuberant program, which also features Avery Fisher Career Grant winner Chad Hoopes, in his Festival debut, playing Ravel’s Sonata in G Major—a blues-inspired violin tour-de-force—with pianist Gilles Vonsattel as well as Tchaikovsky’s roof-raising string sextet Souvenir de Florence.

The dynamic Miami String Quartet plays one of the most beloved works for string quartet, Dvořák’s American Quartet, which the composer wrote while living in the US, and another Czech delight: Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, a lively suite of international dance miniatures that span the waltz to the tango.

Grammy Award winners Ana María Martínez and Craig Terry perform song cycles by Rodrigo, Falla, Campos Parsi, and Turina that reveal the richness of the Spanish-language art-song tradition.

Two of today’s most electrifying classical musicians—violinist Paul Huang and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári—join the Miami String Quartet for Chausson’s lyrical and bravura Concerto in D Major on a program that also includes one of Mendelssohn’s teenaged masterpieces: the String Quartet in A Minor—a work that features several nods to Beethoven, who died only a few months before the piece was written.

Zoltán Fejérvári’s recital program features brilliant collections of short works by Brahms and Schubert—both of which were written toward the end of the composers’ lives—as well as Janáček’s From the Street Piano Sonata, a deeply moving homage that conveys Janáček’s objection to violence as a response to organized protest.

In his Festival debut, cellist Zlatomir Fung, the youngest musician to win first prize in the cello division of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, joins pianist Zoltán Fejérvári to play sonatas that Bach originally wrote for viola da gamba and keyboard and that take listeners on an expansive journey through the composer’s boundless creativity.

This two-work program opens with Beethoven’s sophisticated and innovative Septet—an early composition that remained an inescapable hit throughout the composer’s lifetime—and it closes with Tchaikovsky’s blockbuster Piano Trio in A Minor, which, for this performance, spotlights the virtuosic talents of pianist Zoltán Fejérvári, violinist Chad Hoopes, and cellist Eric Kim.

Pianist Juho Pohjonen praised as “positively electrifying” by The Plain Dealer, marks his Festival return with a recital program that features two dramatic C-minor works of Mozart—the improvisatory Fantasia, K. 475, and more austere Sonata, K. 457—as well as Ravel’s fiendishly challenging piano suite Gaspard de la nuit, whose inspiration comes from three haunting Romantic poems.

Songs of a Wayfarer, Mahler’s heartbreaking song cycle about lost love, is at the center of this recital by multiple Grammy Award–winning mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and renowned pianist Kevin Murphy.

Alan Gilbert makes his first appearance of the season playing violin in Dvořák’s String Quintet in E-flat Major, which includes an additional viola (the composer’s own instrument) and dates from Dvořák’s time in America.

CHRISTOPHER STARK New Work for Piano Trio (Festival Commission, World Premiere)
DVOŘÁK Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 90, Dumky
Juho Pohjonen, piano; Jessica Lee, violin; Zlatomir Fung, cello

The FLUX Quartet gives the US premiere of Charlotte Bray’s Festival-commissioned string quartet Ungrievable Lives, which takes its name and inspiration from an art installation by Caroline Burraway honoring the world’s 13 million child refugees.

Three glorious works showcase the enduring and wide-ranging power of Handel’s music: the dramatic solo cantata La Lucrezia, sung by mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung; the lovely Trio Sonata in G Major; and the Suite No. 5 in E Major, which features the charming air-and-variations movement known as The Harmonious Blacksmith and is played here by New York Philharmonic harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon.

BARTÓK Selected Duos for Two Violins
LIGETI Piano Concerto
ELGAR Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op. 84

The popular Escher String Quartet, praised by The New York Times for their “passionate performances” and “gorgeous tonal sheen,” plays Dutilleux’s only string quartet—the exhilarating Ainsi la Nuit, whose inspiration includes another work on this program: Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4. In between those pieces, the Escher plays Haydn’s wonderfully evocative Bird Quartet.

Soprano Tony Arnold and violinist Movses Pogossian partner for a signature work they’ve recorded and performed live to great acclaim: György Kurtág’s mid-’80s masterpiece Kafka Fragments, a work of staggering expressive range that draws its text from the iconic, early-20th-century author’s personal letters, notebooks, and diary entries.

This thrilling program features two beloved works by Mozart; two premieres, including a Festival-commissioned piano-and-winds quintet by Magnus Lindberg and an oboe quartet by Festival Artistic Director Marc Neikrug; and performances by the Escher String Quartet, Alan Gilbert, Berlin Philharmonic Principal Horn Stefan Dohr, and more.

Pianist Nicolas Namoradze, who won the Honens International Piano Competition in 2018 and made his Festival debut in 2022, returns with a rich recital program that features selections from one of Bach’s most seminal works, The Art of Fugue, and Schubert’s final piano sonata—the exquisite Sonata in B-flat Major, which Schubert wrote just months before his death at the age of 31.

This all-Bach program features two brilliant, beloved works that showcase the virtuosic violin playing of Daniel Phillips—the Violin Concerto in E Major and the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3—while pianist Nicolas Namoradze solos in arguably Bach’s best-known keyboard concerto: the Concerto in D Minor.

The expressive splendor that Messiaen drew from his religious mysticism and devotion to nature is on full display in his epic 12-movement work From the Canyons to the Stars.

Poulenc’s delightful Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano and Beethoven’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano—the first of its kind—make up the first half of this program, while the second half features pianist Nicolas Namoradze in Korngold’s magnificent and virtuosic Suite for Piano Left-Hand, Two Violins, and Cello.

On this single-work program, Haochen Zhang, who won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at the age of 19, plays one of the pinnacles of the solo piano repertoire: Beethoven’s incredibly demanding, despairing, and exhilarating Hammerklavier Sonata.

For the final piano-vocal recital of the season, husband-and-wife duo Jennifer Johnson Cano and Christopher Cano perform songs by 19th-century Romantic composers Bellini, Grieg, and Duparc as well as the 21st-century song cycle Nights Not Spent Alone, by leading English composer Jonathan Dove, whose text comes from poems by early-20th-century American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Two lush, 19th-century sextets—one for strings by Brahms and one for piano and winds by Thuille—feature on this program, which opens with Moszkowski’s spirited, early-20th-century Suite in G Minor for Two Violins and Piano.

The Dover Quartet makes their first Festival appearance of the season playing George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1—a gripping early work by the pioneering, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer—and Schubert’s dramatic Rosamunde Quartet, whose second movement is based on a theme from Schubert’s incidental music for the play Rosamunde.

Two of the world’s leading vocal talents—mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and baritone Thomas Hampson—join forces with acclaimed pianist Bradley Moore for the Festival’s very special and celebratory 50th Anniversary Recital, which features powerfully rendered works by Berlioz, Mahler, and Mozart.

Four longtime friends of the Festival—violinists Benny Kim, Daniel Phillips, Ida Kavafian, and Jennifer Gilbert—solo in one of the most beloved and well-known works of the classical music repertoire: Vivaldi’s sparkling, infectious, and brilliantly evocative The Four Seasons.

Bassist Edgar Meyer—hailed by The New Yorker as “the most remarkable virtuoso” in the history of his instrument—joins the Dover Quartet for his own bluegrass-, folk-, and jazz-influenced Quintet. The program also features the Dover Quartet playing Haydn’s stately Emperor Quartet (originally written for the last Holy Roman Emperor) and pianist Haochen Zhang, violinist Ida Kavafian, and cellist Peter Stumpf performing Brahms’s gorgeous Piano Trio in B Major.

Bringing our milestone 50th season to a spectacular end, the Dover Quartet, violist Ida Kavafian, and cellist Peter Stumpf play Schoenberg’s soaring tone poem Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which takes its inspiration from a poem about the transformative power of compassion and understanding, and pianist Haochen Zhang and bassist Edgar Meyer join members of the Dover Quartet for what’s arguably the most-loved work in the chamber music repertoire: Schubert’s Trout Quintet.