Encore: Past Festival Concerts

Jeffrey Kahane’s cross-genre, cross-disciplinary talents are on full display as he both performs and conducts Ravel’s playful, virtuosic Piano Concerto. On a quest to write enjoyable music, Ravel combines his enthusiasm for jazz with a slow movement so exquisite that it led him to exclaim, “That flowing phrase! How I worked over it, bar by bar! It nearly killed me!” Tolstoy’s comment, “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” sparked Anna Clyne’s miniconcerto for cello. Having given the world premiere of Shorthand in 2022, Festival alumna Karen Ouzounian presides over the Sarasota premiere of this elegiac, mercurial work. The Festival concludes with Brahms’ magnificent Symphony No. 1, a perfect balance of passion and structure that took its composer decades to create.