The 2025 Sarasota Music Festival concludes with a true “Hollywood ending.” Elena Urioste, a Festival alum, will captivate you with her passion and flair for drama as she performs Korngold’s post-Romantic Violin Concerto, brimming with soaring melodies from his film scores. In his Symphony No. 2, Robert Schumann draws inspiration from other music, honoring Bach and incorporating the music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and perhaps even his own scores. Tinged with only a hint of melancholy, the work’s overall message is one of joy, concluding the 61st Sarasota Music Festival on a jubilant note.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work for nine players premiered in 1894 and was not heard again until recently. It showcases the composer’s admiration for Dvořák while revealing his distinctive, late-Romantic voice. Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings, composed as his fame was on the rise, solidified his reputation as a master composer. Pianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin leads the Festival Orchestra from the keyboard in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, which was the last of four concertos he composed between 1784 and 1786 and remains one of the composer’s most popular works.

Conductor Stephanie Childress returns with a captivating program featuring Armenian American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Tagh (Diary) of an Immigrant, which the composer describes as “an imagined journal entry by a hope-filled someone.” Shostakovich wrote his popular Second Piano Concerto—voted ninth in the 2024 “Classic FM Hall of Fame”—for the 19th birthday of his son Maxim, who premiered the work at his conservatory graduation. Beethoven’s joyful Symphony No. 2 teeters on the precipice of several significant moments: it is the last symphony he composed in the style of Mozart, and it also marked the beginning of Beethoven’s mounting realization that his deafness was incurable.

The theme of music and memory takes center stage in the final Festival Friday. Samuel Barber’s 1953 Summer Music, an evocative portrayal of a balmy outdoor afternoon, was composed with the wind players’ favorite effects in mind. Richard Strauss’s powerful Metamorphosen, featuring 23 unique string parts, delves into a period of massive change in Germany. Singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, Jeffrey Kahane’s son, performs October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg, based on his grandmother’s diary as she traveled across America in 1939 after fleeing Germany. Jeffrey Kahane is the soloist in Heirloom, the piano concerto his son composed and dedicated to him “with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe.” Gabriel Kahane conducts this captivating and deeply personal work that intertwines three generations of family history.