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

Inspired by traditional Scandinavian solstice festivities, this modern celebration embraces art, science, and the beauty of nature on the longest day of the year—when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. At CIS, explore the wonders of the cosmos by sky-gazing through the observatory telescope, attending solstice-themed planetarium shows, and participating in interactive science activities. At CAM, enjoy Cranbrook’s beloved Maypole dance, sun-inspired music on the peristyle, and hands-on artmaking activities. Adding to the festivities, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival will present The Dolphins, a dynamic Juilliard string quartet dedicated to excellence, adventure, and accessibility. Educators from The Henry Ford Museum will lead special making activities while guests can enjoy yard games, delicious food, and festive treats on the museum grounds. Celebrate the magic of midsummer with us!

Summer Solstice Celebration

Cranbrook Art Museum

Join us for a festive conclusion to the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival at the Closing Night: Reception. The reception will take place at Park West Gallery following the final performance of Closing Night: Wireworks. Mingle with the extraordinary musicians who brought Blueprints in Sound to life and connect with fellow chamber music enthusiasts over light hors d’oeuvres and warm conversation.

Closing Night: Reception

Park West Gallery

Our Festival-in-Residence series brings the spirit of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival beyond metro Detroit, offering performances in Ann Arbor and Windsor. These concerts embody our commitment to accessibility, collaboration, and artistic excellence—bringing world-class chamber music to new communities.

Festival in Residence: Ann Arbor

Kerrytown Concert House

CIACCONA: The Bass of Time offers works spanning three centuries by four composers: Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Passacaglia; Johann Sebastian Bach’s Ciaccona from Partita No. 2 in d minor; Béla Bartók’s Tempo di Ciaccona from Sonata for Solo Violin; and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII. CIACCONA tells the story of one of music’s most ancient compositional ideas – the development of a simple repeating bass line – through the lens of solo violin repertoire.

Audio/Visual with Robyn Bollinger

Detroit Institute of Arts

Tasting Notes concerts offer a relaxed concert format with a curated tasting of wine and cheese. The second Tasting Notes concert features prose and original music and arrangements for quartet with harmonica celebrating the spirit of African American migrants through the lens of Marion Hayden’s family.

Tasting Notes at 333 Midland: Up South: Reflections of the Great Migration

ONNZ Sculpture

Festival in Residence: Windsor

Capitol Theatre Windsor

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

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

The Catherine Filene Shouse Chamber Music Institute, led by Philip Setzer, provides a platform for emerging professional ensembles. Artistic Encounters are public coachings for Shouse Institute fellows in a setting similar to a masterclass. You are invited to attend these Artistic Encounters to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to be a professional musician.

Artistic Encounter: Gilles Vonsattel

Bloomfield Township Public Library

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

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

Tasting Notes concerts offer a relaxed concert format with a curated tasting of wine and cheese. The first Tasting Notes concert features Third Coast Percussion in a concert entitled, “Time Pieces: The New Classical.”

Tasting Notes at Wasserman Projects

Wasserman Projects

Textures explores the layered meanings of “tract” through three powerful and contrasting chamber works. Franz Schubert’s unfinished String Trio in B-flat Major opens the program with a compact, elegant study in musical motion, balancing ascending arpeggios and descending scales in a kind of lyrical pamphlet. Joan Tower’s To Sing or Dance, a newly commissioned piece, evokes the vitality of the natural world through her signature earthy textures and vivid musical imagery. The program closes with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, a searing memorial to his closest friend, unfolding as an expansive emotional landscape marked by grief, stillness, and unrelenting intensity.

Textures

Kirk in the Hills

Shouse Soundscapes explores the concept of orthography—the architectural idea of elevation and shadow—through a vibrant range of performances by Shouse emerging artists. The program features original works by Dillon Scott and The Dolphins, blending composition and improvisation to capture fleeting emotional moments with striking immediacy. Brahms’s Adagio from his Piano Trio No. 1 offers a masterclass in harmonic shading and introspective motion, while Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor unfolds as an architectural marvel, transforming melodic blueprints into rich musical structures. Together, the repertoire invites listeners to hear music as a form of elevation—of both sound and self.

Shouse Soundscapes

Birmingham Unitarian Church

Artistic Encounter: Jennifer Frautschi with Third Coast Percussion

Sound Beams’ program invites you to experience how composers use structure to create beauty and expression. Debussy’s Violin Sonata offers a heartfelt conversation between violin and piano. Reich’s Music for Pieces of Woodtransforms simple rhythms into something mesmerizing and intricate. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, arranged for string trio, reimagines a single theme in thirty different ways—each one a fresh perspective on a familiar idea.

Sound Beams

Artistic Encounter: Philip Setzer

Begin the 2025 Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival with a concert that brings our theme, Blueprints in Sound, to life. This program explores how composers use structure—like a blueprint—to shape musical ideas. From the world premiere of Sean Shepherd’s Latticework and Britten’s reflections on transformation to Haydn’s classical elegance and Beethoven’s bold reimagining, each piece shows a different take on how form and creativity interact.

Opening Night: Latticework

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.

Opening Night: Dinner

Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel will deliver a stunning performance of two Beethoven piano sonatas, showcasing his technical brilliance and interpretative depth. A recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2016 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award, Vonsattel has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras and is lauded for his imaginative programming.

Vignette, Opus 3: Gilles Vonsattel

Matthew Duvall, founder, artistic director and percussionist of Eighth Blackbird, and Jocelyn Conselva, vocalist and co-director of New Music Detroit, bring an exciting program that merges rhythmic nuance with harmonic color.

Vignette, Opus 2: Matthew Duvall, percussion and Jocelyn Conselva, soprano

Violinist Njioma Grevious and pianist Zhihua Tang bring a captivating program featuring Messiaen’s ethereal Theme and Variations alongside Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2, a work brimming with lyricism and fiery virtuosity. Grevious, a graduate of The Juilliard School and winner of the 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant, is a dynamic soloist and chamber musician celebrated for her expressive artistry. Tang, an esteemed collaborative pianist and associate professor at Michigan State University, is known for her exceptional musical depth.

Vignette, Opus 1: Njioma Grevious, violin and Zhihua Tang, Piano

DCWS returns to the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, sharing the stage at the Seligman Performing Arts Center with great musicians from around the globe.

Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival

DCWS once again performs at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, sharing the stage with world-renowned chamber music luminaries. 

Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival

Jun 21, 2025

Closing Night: Wireworks

Jun 21, 2025

Summer Solstice Celebration

Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival