Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

Join us for a sampling of the best performances from the the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 2023 summer concert season. You’ll hear beloved core works by well-known composers alongside less familiar discoveries, and new commissions, too. Every piece comes to life through virtuosic performances by both veteran and emerging musicians. The series host is eminent WFMT announcer Kerry Frumkin. Composer Marc Neikrug, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s artistic director, provides insightful commentary. Many of the players also share thoughts about their experiences at this remarkable Festival and the music they perform here.

Highlights from the upcoming season include:

• The positively electrifying pianist Juho Pohjonen marks his Festival return with a spotlight on 19th-century composer and cello virtuoso David Popper – whose exquisitely tender Requiem features the unusual scoring of three cellos and a piano. We will then hear Beethoven’s sophisticated and innovative Septet – an early composition that remained an inescapable hit throughout the composer’s lifetime.

• Grammy Award-winning soprano Ana María Martínez and pianist Craig Terry perform a work from Manuel de Falla that reveals the richness of the Spanish-language art song tradition. Then, a showcase of the virtuosic violin playing of Daniel Phillips in Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major. This broadcast also includes the world premiere of Oboe Quartet in Ten Parts composed by long-time Festival Artistic Director and pianist Mark Neikrug.

• Two of today’s most electrifying classical musicians – violinist Paul Huang and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári – join the Miami String Quartet for Ernest Chausson’s lyrical and bravura Concerto in D Major. In this broadcast, we will also hear Poulenc’s delightful Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano.

• Kirill Gerstein, one of the world’s most acclaimed pianists, joins forces with conductor Alan Gilbert and 21 other musicians to give the festival’s first-ever performance of Ligeti’s magnificent Piano Concerto, a masterpiece of originality as witnessed in the composer’s treatment of rhythm and harmony. The dynamic Miami String Quartet plays one of the most beloved works for string quartet, Dvořák’s American, which the composer wrote while living in the US.

• Inon Barnatan – hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most admired pianists of his generation” plays Moments musicaux by Four longtime friends of the Festival – Benny Kim, Daniel Phillips, Ida Kavafian, and Jennifer Gilbert – perform together in a selection from of one the most beloved and well-known works of the classical music repertoire: Vivaldi’s sparkling, infectious, and brilliantly evocative The Four Seasons. This broadcast also includes the wonderfully rich (thanks to its two cellos) String Quintet in F Sharp by the early 20th-century German composer Walter Braunfels.

• Renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine performs Passacaglia from Mystery Sonatas, a work that is a revelation of early-Baroque virtuosity. In his Festival debut, cellist Zlatomir Fung, the youngest musician to win first prize in the cello division of the international Tchaikovsky competition, joins Zoltán Fejérvári to play a Bach sonata that takes the listeners on an expansive journey through the composer’s boundless creativity. Rounding out the program is a lush, 19th-century Sextet for Piano and Winds by Ludwig Thuille.

• The dynamic Miami String Quartet plays a Czech delight: Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, a lively suite of international dance miniatures that span the waltz to the tango. This program continues with pianists Gilles Vonsattel and Inon Barnatan playing a work for two pianos by Debussy. This season of broadcasts ends with Moritz Moszkowski’s spirited early 20th-century Suite in G Minor for Two Violins and Piano.