Sarasota Music Festival Announces 2019 Highlights

Sarasota Music Festival announced its concert programs for the 2019 Festival season, the third under Music Director Jeffrey Kahane.  

Only the third music director in the Festival’s 55-year history, Kahane has expressed a commitment to upholding the mission and traditions of the Festival, while instituting new programs and concert formats intended to attract broader audiences. 

The four-weekend Festival runs from June 1 – 22 and features a wide range of classical music concerts, master classes, coaching sessions, and open rehearsals.    

“This is going to be a very exciting Festival for everyone, both on stage and in the audience,” Kahane said. “There’s an enormous variety and range of repertoire, definitely something for everyone.”

Sarasota Music Festival Highlights include:  

• The 2019 Sarasota Music Festival opens with a special concert featuring Brahms’ three Sonatas for Violin and Piano. Angelo Xiang Yu, Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition winner, and Kahane will play the sonatas in succession, making this a rare opportunity to hear all three sonatas in one program. “These three glorious masterworks of the chamber repertoire are among the works closest to my heart, and I know Angelo feels the same way,” Kahane said. “It will be the first time we will be playing an entire recital program together, and I think it will be a magnificent way to launch the Festival with a new kind of event.”
• Two renowned ensembles consisting of SMF faculty will join the Festival as guest artists and masterclass mentors. The Montrose Trio, which The Washington Post raved is “poised to become one of the top piano trios in the world,” will perform Mendelssohn’s energetic Piano Trio No. 2 on June 7. The Pacifica Quartet joins Kahane on piano in a performance of Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor on June 14. “This represents the first time in the history of the Festival that fixed chamber ensembles will join the faculty both as chamber groups and as individual faculty members,” Kahane said. “This will provide the Festival Fellows and patrons a special window into the performance of repertoire for piano and strings and for string quartet from the perspective of musicians who have devoted a substantial part of their musical lives to ensemble playing.”
• Cassia Drake and Katherine Arndt, both 2018 SMF Fellows, return to Sarasota joining Jeffrey Kahane and the SMF orchestra in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. “Both Cassia Drake and Katherine Arndt gave stunningly beautiful performances on various chamber concerts, and they seemed to us to be ideally suited for a performance of Mozart’s sublime Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, considered by many musicians and music-lovers to be among his most beautiful and moving works,” Kahane said.
• Five new faculty artists include Romie de Guise-Langlois, renowned soloist and chamber musician on major concert stages throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia; Martin Beaver, former first violinist of the Tokyo Quartet; Nathan Hughes, principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Aloysia Friedmann, founder and artistic director of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival.