Sarasota Music Festival Reveals 60th Anniversary Theme and Concert Highlights

Sarasota Music Festival has announced its concert programs for the 2024 Festival season.  Celebrating its 60th anniversary, this year’s Festival is themed “Music Unbound.”

The three-week Festival runs from June 2 – 22 and features a schedule of 14 different concerts, and events, as well as a wide range of masterclasses, coaching sessions, and rehearsals. 

Nearly 500 fellows from top music programs at colleges and conservatories worldwide audition to participate in the Festival each year, but only 60 are accepted. Selected musicians work side-by-side with a group of 40 faculty artists who represent many of the most renowned music schools and conservatories.

“Over the course of three weeks, fellows will have the opportunity to experience and participate in the many ways in which composers and performers of the past and present have explored the interaction between very different musical languages and modes of performing,” says Music Director Jeffrey Kahane.

Programming will spotlight the beauty that results when some of the world’s most versatile musicians join together to share their gifts,highlighting the transformative magic that occurs when differing musical genres and performance styles are brought into intentional and dynamic relationship with each other.

Sarasota Music Festival highlights include:

• 60th Anniversary Concert: New Beginnings – Sunday, June 2 – 4:00pm: The 60th Anniversary Festival begins with a program that unites the past, present and future. Music Director Jeffrey Kahane will perform on harpsichord alongside flutist and Festival alumna Marianne Gedigan for a work from the archives—Francois Couperin’s Le Rossignol en amour (The Nightingale in Love). Bohuslav Martinů’s mid-20th-century Sonata for Flute and Piano, composed in Cape Cod, provides a contrast with its jazz-infused rhythms. Festival alumna and talented improviser Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir takes center stage with Jane Antonia Cornish’s Portrait for solo cello. Arensky’s Piano Trio No. 1, a prime example of Romanticism, anchors the program.  

• Bach and Beyond – Friday, June 7 – 7:30pm: Sarasota Music Festival faculty, fellows and the Borromeo String Quartet join forces for music separated by time yet linked by emotion, innovation and creativity. Faculty member Jeff Scott’s Passion for Bach and Coltraneproceeds from the opening of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations and ventures boldly down unexpected avenues. Music Director Jeffrey Kahane plays keyboard in a performance of Bach’s thrilling Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. The Borromeo String Quartet interprets a piece from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the “Old Testament” of keyboard music, transformed by the ensemble’s violist Nicholas Kitchen. Returning faculty Paul Neubauer joins the Borromeo String Quartet for Mozart’s famous String Quintet No. 4 in G Minor.

• Tales and Tributes – Friday, June 14 – 7:30pm: The teenage Richard Strauss pays homage to Mozart and Mendelssohn in his E-flat Serenade for Winds. Subtitled “A Romance,” Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending brings innocence to life. Jeff Scott’s Trail of Tears tells the story of his great-great-grandfather, of Cherokee descent, who was among the 60,000 Native Americans forcibly ejected from their homes in the 19th century. Written in 1876 and bearing the dedication “For My Nation,” Antonín Dvořák’s Quintet in G Major adds double bass to the traditional string quartet, a work that helped launch his international career.
• American Soundscapes – Saturday, June 15 – 7:30pm: This one-night-only musical event fully encompasses the spirit of the 2024 Festival. Hailstork’s Sonata da Chiesa— “church sonata”—reflects his personal fascination with cathedrals. Written for Benny Goodman, Copland’s Clarinet Concerto is the only conductor-led piece on the program. Tessa Lark, Mike Block, and Jeffrey Kahane improvise on beloved American songs, while Lark and Block duet with traditional fiddle tunes. The perfumed world of 18th-century France collides with 21st-century jazz in Block’s arrangement of Dieupart’s Sarabande, then Block leads Festival fellows in an exhilarating, spur-of-the-moment jam. Lark puts her distinctive stamp on bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the experience culminates with Iniche Cosebe, Block’s quasi-improvised work inspired by “thank you very much” in the language of the Mandinka people of Africa.
• Passion and Pride – Saturday, June 22 – 7:30pm: Jeffrey Kahane’s cross-genre, cross-disciplinary talents are on full display as he both performs and conducts Ravel’s playful, virtuosic Piano Concerto in G Major. Tolstoy’s comment, “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” sparked Anna Clyne’s mini-concerto for cello, Shorthand. Festival alumna and new faculty artist Karen Ouzounian presents the Sarasota premiere of the elegiac, mercurial work. The Festival concludes with Brahms’s magnificent Symphony No. 1, a blend of passion and structure that took decades to create.
• New Faculty for 2024: 15 new faculty members join the distinguished roster, representing several of the nation’s major performing organizations including the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra and The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well as the most highly-regarded teaching programs from The Juilliard School and New England Conservatory to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

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