Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

Join the WFMT Radio Network on a musical journey to the foothills of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains via thirteen new, music-filled hours from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Founded in 1972, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is one of the world’s leading performing arts festivals, earning both critical praise and dedicated audiences for its lasting commitment to tradition, artistic excellence, and vision. Our series reflects the Festival’s high standards through a varied selection of superbly recorded concerts featuring the finest classical musicians of our day.

Each broadcast hour typically contains two or three full-length compositions representing chamber music’s masterful and widely dynamic repertoire. You’ll hear beloved core works by well-known composers alongside less familiar discoveries, and new commissions, too. Every piece comes to life through virtuosic performances by both veteran and emerging musicians. The series host is eminent WFMT announcer Kerry Frumkin. Composer Marc Neikrug, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s artistic director, provides insightful commentary. Many of the players also share thoughts about their experiences at this remarkable Festival and the music they perform here.

As the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival enters its 51st anniversary season, the 2024-25 radio series features a sampling of the best performances from the 2023 summer concert season.

Here are some highlights from the upcoming season of performances from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, releasing Spring 2024:

  • The positively electrifying pianist Juho Pohjonen marks his Festival return with a spotlight on 19th-century composer and cello virtuoso David Popper – whose exquisitely tender Requiem features the unusual scoring of three cellos and a piano. We will then hear Beethoven’s sophisticated and innovative Septet – an early composition that remained an inescapable hit throughout the composer’s lifetime. (SFE 24-02)
  • Grammy Award-winning soprano Ana María Martínez and pianist Craig Terry perform a work from Manuel de Falla that reveals the richness of the Spanish-language art song tradition. Then, a showcase of the virtuosic violin playing of Daniel Phillips in Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major. This broadcast also includes the world premiere of Oboe Quartet in Ten Parts composed by long-time Festival Artistic Director and pianist Mark Neikrug. (SFE24-04)
  • Two of today’s most electrifying classical musicians – violinist Paul Huang and pianist Zoltán Fejérvári – join the Miami String Quartet for Ernest Chausson’s lyrical and bravura Concerto in D Major. In this broadcast, we will also hear Poulenc’s delightful Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano. (SFE 24-07)
  • Kirill Gerstein, one of the world’s most acclaimed pianists, joins forces with conductor Alan Gilbert and 21 other musicians to give the festival’s first-ever performance of Ligeti’s magnificent Piano Concerto, a masterpiece of originality as witnessed in the composer’s treatment of rhythm and harmony. The dynamic Miami String Quartet plays one of the most beloved works for string quartet, Dvořák’s American, which the composer wrote while living in the US. (SFE 24-09)
  • Inon Barnatan – hailed by the New York Times as “one of the most admired pianists of his generation” plays Moments musicaux by Four longtime friends of the Festival – Benny Kim, Daniel Phillips, Ida Kavafian, and Jennifer Gilbert – perform together in a selection from of one the most beloved and well-known works of the classical music repertoire: Vivaldi’s sparkling, infectious, and brilliantly evocative The Four Seasons. This broadcast also includes the wonderfully rich (thanks to its two cellos) String Quintet in F Sharp by the early 20th-century German composer Walter Braunfels. (SFE 24-11)
  • Renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine performs Passacaglia from Mystery Sonatas, a work that is a revelation of early-Baroque virtuosity. In his Festival debut, cellist Zlatomir Fung, the youngest musician to win first prize in the cello division of the international Tchaikovsky competition, joins Zoltán Fejérvári to play a Bach sonata that takes the listeners on an expansive journey through the composer’s boundless creativity. Rounding out the program is a lush, 19th-century Sextet for Piano and Winds by Ludwig Thuille. (SFE 24-12)
  • The dynamic Miami String Quartet plays a Czech delight: Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet, a lively suite of international dance miniatures that span the waltz to the tango. This program continues with pianists Gilles Vonsattel and Inon Barnatan playing a work for two pianos by Debussy. This season of broadcasts ends with Moritz Moszkowski’s spirited early 20th-century Suite in G Minor for Two Violins and Piano. (SFE 24-13)

 

Music production for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series is by Grammy award-winning recording engineer, Matthew Snyder.  The series producer is Louise Frank, whose Studs Terkel: Montage of a Life garnered the top honor at the New York Festivals, and whose extensive profiles of international music makers include programs about Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, Marilyn Horne, Renée Fleming, Twyla Tharp, and Philip Glass.

 

Details

Category: Chamber Music
Duration: 1-hour / 59:00
Frequency: 13-part
Availability: 04/02/2024 - 04/01/2025

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Credits

  • Host: Kerry Frumkin
  • Commentary: Marc Neikrug
  • Producer: Louise Frank
  • Recording Engineer: Matt Snyder
  • Underwriter: The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series is made possible, in part, by generous underwriting from the Festival’s supporters. For more information please visit santafechambermusic.com.