Violinist

This compelling reimagining of Silkroad’s acclaimed American Railroad program features an intimate, powerful ensemble of eight world-class musicians led by internationally renowned pipa master Wu Man. The program weaves a sonic tapestry that honors the often-overlooked contributions of Indigenous and African Americans, along with Chinese, Irish, Japanese, and other immigrant communities who laid the tracks that transformed a nation. Amplifying the voices of those who built the railroads—and those displaced by them—the Silkroad Ensemble reveals a richer, more inclusive portrait of America’s past.

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American Railroad

The Music Center at Strathmore

La follia d’amore – Zwischen Liebe und Wahnsinn

St. Lorenz - Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchengemeinde Hof - St. Lorenz

The program of Negative Space highlights music that explores space, absence, and the power of what’s left unsaid. Hannah Kendall’s Vera builds and unbuilds a musical structure using a twelve-tone row, creating a sense of shifting texture and hidden emotion. Ravel’s Piano Trio showcases his signature clarity and color, carefully balancing sound and silence to shape each moment. Michi Wiancko’s Fantasia for Tomorrow offers a heartfelt tribute to connection and hope, imagining a future that is just out of reach but deeply felt in the present.

Negative Space

Detroit Institute of Arts

Tessa Lark Returns

Sarasota Orchestra

Join us for an enchanting evening with the La Jolla Music Society as we present "Midweek Masterworks: Instrumental Stories" on Wednesday, August 21, 2024, at 7 PM in the prestigious Baker-Baum Concert Hall. This unique concert experience will illuminate the profound narratives behind some of the most celebrated compositions in classical music, featuring a lineup of pieces that bridge personal stories with the rich histories of the instruments used to perform them.

The evening will spotlight Brahms’ "String Sextet No. 1," a masterpiece that will be brought to life through the personal stories of the musicians and the venerable histories of their instruments. Adding to the musical tapestry, we will present Bartók’s "Contrasts," a vibrant fusion of classical music and jazz elements, originally commissioned by the legendary Benny Goodman. This piece will showcase the talents of Yura Lee on violin, Anthony McGill on clarinet, and Gilles Vonsattel on piano, creating an unforgettable auditory experience.

Further enriching the program, Michi Wiancko’s "Lullaby for the Transient" will offer a meditative reflection on themes of immigration, performed by an ensemble including Simone Porter and TBA on violins, Jonathan Vinocour on viola, Paul Wiancko on cello, and Anthony McGill returning on clarinet.

The concert will also feature Brahms’ "String Sextet No. 1, Op. 18," interpreted by a distinguished group of musicians including James Ehnes, Jack Liebeck, Yura Lee, Jonathan Vinocour, Paul Watkins, and Kyril Zlotnikov.

To make your evening even more special, we invite you to enjoy a complimentary glass of champagne during our "Midweek Cheers" celebration. This intermission-less concert allows for a seamless musical journey, culminating in a celebratory toast with fellow concertgoers in the Wu Tsai QRT.yrd following the performance.

Don’t miss this deeply engaging exploration of music’s power to tell stories, weaving together personal and historical narratives through the universal language of music.

Midweek Masterworks: Instrumental Stories

Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center

With repertoire spanning the canon to contemporary works, this beloved series is unparalleled in ambition and depth. Under the inspired curation of new Director of Chamber Music Paul Wiancko, globally renowned chamber musicians present 11 ingenious programs rich in revelry and fellowship. Paul’s inaugural season welcomes composer-in-residence Reena Esmail, along with an array of talented first-timers and Festival favorites ready to rock the Dock.

Bank of America Chamber Music

Dock Street Theatre

The Jupiter String Quartet is a particularly intimate group, consisting of violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel (Meg’s older sister), and cellist Daniel McDonough (Meg’s husband, Liz’s brother-in-law). Now enjoying their 20th year together, this tight-knit ensemble is firmly established as an important voice in the world of chamber music.

Jupiter String Quartet With Soyeon Kate Lee, Piano

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Artistic Director Daria Adams curates a one-hour program of four pieces by living composers, whose works look back in some way, then weaves them together with their historical counterparts. This leads to some fascinating juxtapositions, such as a song by Hildegard von Bingen from 1100 A.D with a work for strings and harpsichord by Michi Wiancko from 2021. Daria has paired Elizabethan ­era songs by John Dowland, Italian madrigals by Gesualdo, and a Bourree by J.S. Bach with modern counterparts by Wiancko and Caroline Shaw. 

California Festival Concert

Napa Methodist Church

Music in the Vineyards

Under the leadership of 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner, the dynamic multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying Silkroad Ensemble embarks on a new initiative that illuminates the impact of under-recognized voices in America’s expansion west. The project explores the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad through the contributions of African American, Chinese, Irish, Indigenous, and other communities, their cultures, and their music. Chinese traditional instruments like the guzheng, pipa, erhu, and qinqin are contrasted with the fiddle, bones, tambo, and banjo of Black musical traditions, and their Indigenous and Celtic counterparts. New compositions and commissions weave these disparate traditions together to tell a new version of the American story. As Giddens told the New York Times, “Silkroad has people from all over, and that’s what makes it such a great group to represent the American story, because that’s what the American story is. We are world music”.

American Railroad Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

University of California, Berkeley

American Railroad highlights the cultural diffusion and collaboration that resulted as African American, Chinese, Irish, and Native American communities made vital contributions to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens, the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble recontextualizes the railroad through the sounds of the worlds that collided through its creation.

Stanford University

Silkroad’s newest initiative, American Railroad, illuminates the impact of African American, Chinese, Irish, and Native American communities on the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad and America’s Westward Expansion. Exploring the dissemination of cultures across the United States, the railroad was to North America what the Silk Road was to China, the Far East and Europe.

American Railroad: Silkroad Ensemble With Rhiannon Giddens

Soka Performing Arts Center

American Railroad Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens1

As a social-impact organization and home to a Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble, Silkroad works to inspire collaboration in innovative ways that add more equity and justice into the world through the power of the arts. Today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad reaches new heights through a commitment to new music, a re-sparked mission towards cultural collaboration, and a reinvigorated focus to high-quality arts education that both reflects its mission and the times in which we live.

Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

Balboa Theatre

We are so excited to begin the season with a blockbuster concert featuring two works for keyboard by two of the greatest European composers of the 18th century! Working in collaboration with the International Center for Music at Park University, Maestro Bruce Sorrell is thrilled to have award winning pianist Kuok-Wai Lio join the orchestra to perform both an amazing early Mozart concerto, and the incredible Bach Brandenburg 5 with the orchestra. What a treat it will be to hear both of these great works in one evening, interpreted by this young virtuoso.

Bach is Back!  – And Mozart Too

Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral

The Grammy-winning Parker Quartet (“something extraordinary,” New York Times) leads a Beethoven-based program that includes a work by Beethoven’s teacher, Haydn; three short works inspired by Beethoven’s Quartets, by Suzanne Farrin, Anthony Cheung, and Michi Wiancko (also heard at the Festival as violinist); and Beethoven’s monumental String Quartet, op. 130 (with the epic Grosse Fuge). The Parker Quartet illuminates Beethoven’s quartet with an engaging verbal introduction to the work.

Parker Quartet: Beethoven Illuminated

First Presbyterian Church

Vis-À-Vis

Libbey Bowl

The talented musicians performing in Ensemble Connect form “one of the strongest ensembles in the city” (New York Classical Review). Over the course of this two-year fellowship program, extraordinary young professionals perform a series of concerts that smartly bridges the history and future of classical music, from timeless Baroque music to new works. This program includes a Philadelphia premiere by Michi Wiancko, commissioned by Carnegie Hall; brilliant quintets by Mozart and R. Schumann; and Dark Wood by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon—a title that refers to the bassoon, used virtuosically throughout the piece.

Ensemble Connect

American Philosophical Society

Now in its 20th year, the Jupiter String Quartet derived its name from the most prominent planet in the sky. The astrological symbol for Jupiter resembles the number four. The musicians place a strong emphasis on developing relationships with future classical music audiences through educational performances within schools and other community centers. They believe that, because of the intensity of its interplay and communication, chamber music is one of the most effective ways of spreading an enthusiasm for “classical” music to new audiences.

The quartet has performed across the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Americas in some of the world’s finest halls, including New York City’s Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress, Austria’s Esterhazy Palace, and Seoul’s Sejong Chamber Hall.

Jupiter String Quartet

Sunset Center Theater

Marc-André Hamelin, a pianist praised for his “commanding technique” along with his “warmth and affection” (NY Times), makes his long-awaited debut with Orpheus to perform Mozart’s sparkling Piano Concerto No. 12. Michi Wiancko’s take on fanciful delights by Chopin and the unflinchingly honest final sonata from Schubert allow the orchestra to flesh out sounds and emotions buried within these piano masterpieces.

Orpheus & Marc-André Hamelin

Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

Community Church of Vero Beach

The most famous motif of the Fifth Symphony of Sibelius comes in the final movement. Often drawing inspiration from nature, Sibelius’s connection with the Finnish landscape was integral to his identity. “Today at ten to eleven I saw sixteen swans,” he wrote in his diary in 1915. “One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon.” This moment was the inspiration for what he would call the “Swan Hymn,” the swinging horn motif that evokes the graceful beating of the swans’ wings as the woodwinds’ countermelody suggests their call.

Gleaming Glow

Southern Oregon University

Grants Pass High School

Collier Center for the Performing Arts

Following their Caramoor debut in the Fall, the Poiesis Quartet returns with another program that showcases their fresh take on chamber music. Formed at Oberlin in 2022 and now based in Cincinnati, this award-winning ensemble has quickly gained national attention, with honors including the 2023 Fischoff Grand Prize and joining the Concert Artists Guild roster in 2024. Known for their rich, cohesive sound and adventurous programming, the quartet breathes new life into classical masterworks while amplifying bold, contemporary voices. Don’t miss the chance to experience one of today’s most compelling young string quartets.

Violinist

Michi Wiancko

Events

Upcoming events

Mar 4, 2026

Orpheus & Marc-André Hamelin · Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

Mar 5, 2026

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra · Indian River Symphonic Association

24 - 26 Apr, 2026

Gleaming Glow · Rogue Valley Symphony

May 3, 2026

Poiesis Quartet · Caramoor

Past events

Nov 16, 2025

American Railroad · Strathmore

Jun 29, 2025

La follia d’amore – Zwischen Liebe und Wahnsinn · Hofer Symphoniker

About

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