Bringing the festival to a close with music built from small, repeating patterns, Closing Night:Wireworks explores how repeated shapes give rise to deep emotional worlds. Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2 unfolds in flowing, intricate layers, each phrase subtly echoing the last, while Brahms’s Two Songs for Voice, Viola, and Piano weaves voice and viola into a tender, interlaced duet. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story selections bring energy and elegance to the finale, grounded in the iconic tritone interval that underpins the entire score and its vision of love and equality. Like the textiles of Ruth Adler Schnee, whose work inspired this season, each piece turns careful design into something luminous, human, and alive.

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Closing Night: Wireworks

Detroit Country Day School - Upper School

A favorite of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Musical Chairs comes from the imagination of Shouse Institute Director Philip Setzer. Shouse groups, made up of emerging professional ensembles, are deconstructed and reassembled as fellows are challenged to perform together for the first time. Each group will include one special member and coach from our outstanding line-up of Festival artists.

Musical Chairs Plus: Performance & Pop-up

Cranbrook Art Museum

Inspired by Ruth Adler Schnee’s textile Strata Echo, this concert explores the beauty of layered design in both fabric and sound. Hannah Kendall’s Network Bed weaves melodies in intricate patterns, followed by Frank Bridge’s Cello Sonata, where lines of music stretch and pivot with emotional depth. The evening concludes with Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2, blending folk themes with sweeping romanticism.

Strata Echo

Temple Beth El

Step inside St. Hugo of the Hills for an evening that explores the musical building blocks at the heart of great compositions. World-renowned organist James O’Donnell, former Master of Music at Westminster Abbey, leads a powerful program featuring organ concertos by Handel and Poulenc. Joined by works from Saint-Saëns and Composer-in-Residence Hannah Kendall, Cornerstone reveals how composers embed structure, contrast, and emotion into the smallest musical ideas—each one a foundation for something extraordinary.

Cornerstone

St. Hugo of the Hills Church

Kick off the 2025 Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in style at our Opening Night Dinner—an evening of delicious cuisine, flavorful wine, and engaging conversation with Festival artists and fellow chamber music supporters.

Trio Dolce

Jun 21, 2025

Closing Night: Wireworks

Jun 18, 2025

Musical Chairs Plus: Performance & Pop-up

Trio Dolce