Encore: Past Festival Concerts

Music can transport us through time, yet it is forever tied to its moment of creation. The 61st Sarasota Music Festival begins with an epic 300-year musical adventure. Hear the 18th-century tune people whistled in the streets that found its way into Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Trio. Nicolas Namoradze makes his Festival debut with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from the landmark Well-Tempered Clavier. Leap 150 years ahead to Scriabin’s lush, late-Romantic Sonata, and fast-forward another century for Namoradze’s own arrangement of Ravel’s ballet music. Jeffrey Kahane joins Namoradze for Schubert’s sparkling rondo, written in the composer’s final year.

Twentieth-century Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos grew up amidst the sounds of the street musicians of Rio de Janeiro. In her Festival debut, the versatile flutist Alex Sopp brings her talents to Villa-Lobos´ popular Assiobio a Játo (The Jet Whistle). Michi Wiancko reflects on her musical experiences with her mother in the nostalgic Fantasia for Tomorrow. Tessa Lark, Mike Block, and Jeffrey Kahane reprise their 2024 Festival’s triumph of improvisation, this time using an Old English folk song. The program ends with a gorgeous Piano Trio by Rebecca Clarke.

Festival faculty and fellows team up for Bach’s joyous Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, one of the great monuments of 18th-century music. Shostakovich dedicated his Piano Trio No. 2 to his dear departed friend Ivan Sollertinsky, harnessing Jewish folk idioms to honor his memory. Mike Block revisits his fascinating Global Music Collaboration, a unique cross-cultural experience reflecting live performance’s spontaneous magic. Ludwig Thuille’s lyrical Sextet provides a charming conclusion to this wide-ranging program.

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.

Festival fellows bring their favorite chamber works to life, performing a selection of short pieces and movements.