- June 5, 2025
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Festival programmers are always looking for a theme or a thread to connect all the events. Last year’s Sarasota Music Festival celebrated its 60th anniversary, so there was lots of looking back at the festival’s history.
Co-founded at New College by Paul Wolfe, the SMF merged in 1985 with the Florida West Coast Symphony, which rebranded in 2008 as the Sarasota Orchestra. The festival now brings about 60 young musicians (fellows) to town and pairs them with about 40 experienced faculty members for three weeks of classes, rehearsals and concerts open to the public.
You can buy a ticket to a single class or rehearsal for as little as $5 and a festival pass that allows you to enjoy all these informal performances for just $75. Tickets to formal concerts begin at $15, depending on the show.
For the first time this year, the Sarasota Orchestra has included the Sarasota Music Festival in its Flex Pass, which offers 15% off single-ticket prices if you buy three tickets and 20% off if you buy four or more. The SMF concerts included in the pass include the Artist Showcase, Festival Friday and Festival Saturday series.
For music lovers who like to hunker down in Holley Hall and the Sarasota Opera House, the Sarasota Music Festival is pure paradise. It’s also a thrill for festival fellows to be coached by well-known professionals, some of whom are SMF alums themselves, and to perform for Sarasota’s generous audiences.
It’s also a great way to start a career, as more than one fellow has ended up joining the Sarasota Orchestra. Here’s looking at you, co-horn principal Hugo Bliss!
Even though the 60th Sarasota Music Festival celebrated its history, it wasn’t backward-looking when it came to programming. Under SMF Music Director Jeffrey Kahane, the festival explored improvisation and genre-crossing under the banner of “Music Unbound.”
Improvisation in classical music is well-known territory to Robert Levin, the festival’s former director who spoke on that topic and performed at the annual lecture that bears his name in 2024 and returns again this year, on June 11. So, in some ways, it wasn't new. But last year brought the excitement of classical improv and cross-cultural performances to a new level.
One of the most exhilarating concerts of the 2024 festival, “American Soundscapes,” brought together fiddler and violinist Tessa Lark, cellist Mike Block and pianist Kahane.
They performed improvisations on American folk songs in the concert, which also featured clarinetist Charles Neidich. Charles Dieupart’s Baroque piece “Sarabande” was transformed into a jazz jam session, thanks to an arrangement by Block.
Another noteworthy part of that jamboree was when Block led a group of fellows in his West African-inspired composition, “Inche Cosebe” (“Thank You Very Much” in the Mandinka language) that he had taught them by ear. Some fellows expressed trepidation about the process of learning and playing without sheet music, but the joyful performance brought the house down.
So what do you do for an encore? Well, Kahane, who is finishing his first season as music director of a revitalized San Antonio Philharmonic, wants to recreate some of that improv magic by reuniting with Block and Lark under the umbrella of this year’s festival theme, “Music as a Mirror of History.”
That tent has plenty of room for time travel and for juxtaposing recent works with familiar compositions.
“This year’s festival is curated around the idea that different pieces of music reflect their particular moment in history,” Kahane said in a telephone interview. “The pieces that I and my colleagues have selected allow us to time travel, to learn what they tell us about the moment they were composed as well as our relationship to the past.”
The opening concert, “Echoes Across Eras,” gets into the spirit of things with a musical tour of three centuries. Pianist Nicolas Namoradze makes his festival debut with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from “Well-Tempered Clavier.”
The program also includes Namoradze’s arrangement of Ravel’s ballet music, but the high point is sure to be Schubert’s Rondo in A Major for four hands, where Namoradze will be joined by Kahane on piano.
In addition to Namoradze, who will perform in three different concerts, another new faculty member this year at SMF is violinist Elena Urioste. A former festival fellow, Urioste will perform Korngold’s Violin Concerto in the Festival Finale concert on Saturday, June 21. The program also includes Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C Major.
Kahane said he got the idea for this year’s program from a book he read a few years ago called “Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War.” It was written by longtime Boston Globe classical music critic Jeremy Eichler, now a professor of music history and public humanities at Tufts University.
When Kahane was reading the book about four composers (Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dimitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten) and how their musical compositions were shaped by World War II and the Holocaust, his memory was jogged.
“The book reminded me of how I did a project many years ago involving hundreds of kids with Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem,’ when I was at the Santa Rosa Symphony,” he said. Kahane was music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony for 10 seasons and serves as its conductor emeritus.
Eichler’s book helped inspire Kahane’s selection of such SMF pieces as Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, which is part of the concert “From Bach to Block” on Friday, June 6. Shastakovich dedicated his 1944 composition to a friend who recently died, Ivan Sollertinsky, but the piece coincides with the world learning about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.
But the program doesn’t dwell entirely on darkness. Also on the bill of the concert being performed by festival faculty and fellows are Bach’s joyful Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, and Block’s Global Music Collaboration, giving audiences another taste of the spontaneity that was such a hit in last year’s festival.
The June 5 concert titled “Tessa Lark Returns,” brings Kahane, Lark and Block back together again for what’s sure to be one of the crowd pleasers of the festival. The trio will perform together on Improvisation on an Old English Folk Song and on Clarke’s Piano Trio.
The program also includes “The Jet Whistle” by Villa-Lobos featuring Alex Sopp on flute and Karen Ouzounian, another favorite from the 2024 festival, on cello. Rounding out the program is Michi Wiancko’s “Fantasia for Tomorrow” featuring Lark on violin and Paul Neubauer on viola.
This year’s Sarasota Music Festival is a family affair for Kahane because it will include a performance by his son, Gabriel Kahane, in the second to the last concert of the festival. Gabriel will first play solo piano on his piece, “October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg.”
Then father and son will switch places as Gabriel conducts the festival orchestra and his father plays piano on Gabriel’s three-movement concerto called “Heirloom,” which tells the story of three generations of their family.
“The first movement is inspired by my wife and my story. The heart of the piece is the second movement, about my mother, who fled Nazi Germany when she was 17 along with her father, who had been released from a concentration camp. The final movement is a lighthearted and joyous piece, a portrait of my granddaughter, Vera Rose, when she was 2 years old,” Kahane said.
Kahane’s mother, who was from Magdeburg, Germany, first went to Cuba with her father for six months because a quota system prevented them from immigrating to the U.S. After entering the U.S. in New Orleans, they made their way to Los Angeles in 1939, where the family settled.
A native of Los Angeles, Jeffrey Kahane is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied piano. He later went on to win or be a finalist in numerous prestigious piano competitions and to make solo appearances both in recitals and with major orchestras around the world.
Kahane made his conducting debut in 1988, at the Oregon Bach Festival. In May 2017, he completed his 20th and final season as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He is currently a professor of Keyboard Studies at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
Kahane is in his ninth year as music director of the Sarasota Music Festival, but he considers it to be only his seventh season. “We lost a year due to COVID, and the next year we just did a mini festival,” he noted.
In keeping with the music-as-mirror theme of this year’s festival, Kahane included “Metamorphosen,” a piece for 23 solo strings that Strauss wrote in the final days of World War II as he contemplated the destruction of Germanic civilization. Considered a successor to Wagner and Liszt, Strauss holds a place in the late period of German Romanticism, along with Gustav Mahler.
Strauss didn’t look away from the horror of his times; he made music out of the experience. Like many of the works performed in the 2025 Sarasota Music Festival, “Metamorphosen” holds a mirror up to dark days of the past to help us understand the experience and hopefully to avoid repeating it.
