Sarasota Music Festival highlights storytelling in 2023 season concert programs

Since he took over as music director of the Sarasota Music Festival, Jeffrey Kahane has been playing around with the format of the annual summer event, the programming and the faculty.

The festival, which began in 1965, attracts dozens of students and early-career musicians who spend three weeks in Sarasota studying with professional artists and performing in chamber and orchestral programs.

For 2023, which runs June 3-23, Kahane said he wanted to do “something a little different. I’ve woven a theme into all the programs, to explore the idea of the power of music to tell stories in different ways. I guess you could say it’s also a celebration of the imagination in response to music.”

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Kahane said music and stories have been combined “together as far back as we can go in time. At some point in history, music takes on this power to tell stories without using words, and this year’s festival is exploring all the many different ways composers have approached narrative.”

For example in the June 10 concert, the student-faculty orchestra will perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 “Pastorale” which tells its own story about the natural world, with the sounds of bird calls and thunderstorms. That same concert features movements from Felix Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” based on Shakespeare’s play.

The June 9 “Scenes and Seasons” program will include the “Summer” section of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

“He wrote poems into the score. He’s not just asking us to imagine summer, but to see the story of a shepherd dealing with summer thunderstorms and so on,” Kahane said.

That concert also features violinist Melissa White, a founding member of the Harlem Quartet, which will be performing next winter for the Sarasota Concert Association. And SMF alum Anne-Marie McDermott will perform Schumann’s Piano Concerto.

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The June 17 concert features Ottorino Respighi’s “Botticelli Triptych,” which captures through music three paintings by the Renaissance artist – “Primavera” (Spring), “The Adoration of the Magi” and “The Birth of Venus.”

How audiences respond to the selections throughout the summer concert series will depend on their familiarity with the stories. “You don’t need to know the stories,” Kahane said. “I think one of the magical things about this, one could listen to the pieces without knowing the titles and without knowing the references and still get tremendous pleasure, but knowing the background enhances it.”

The season will include 60 young musicians and 40 faculty members. Each weekend offers a mix of chamber and orchestral programs and “Rising Stars” concerts focused on the festival fellows. They used to be known as students “but we changed that a few years ago because so many of them are actually already in the early stages of a professional career and it seemed a more respectful way to refer to them as fellows,” Kahane said.

There have been faculty members who have been part of the program for decades, but Kahane committed to starting a rotation to allow new artists to join the faculty without severing ties with long-established mentors. And he continues to bring in guest artists, like the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet, featuring SMF alum violinist Domenic Salerni, which will join with Kahane on the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor on June 16. That concert also includes a 13-instrument version of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”

Even as a growing number of participants have already started their careers (compared to earlier years), Kahane said the festival “gives them the opportunity to be mentored by people who have been in the profession a long time and a number of them who came to the festival themselves as young musicians to study,” Kahane said.

They also have a chance to “perform for a discerning audience of music lovers and to interact with other musicians and form relationships, and many of them form deep friendships over the course of just three weeks.”

Among the summer highlights are a June 15 Artist Showcase that will mark 50 years of flutist Carol Wincenc’s career. She has spent many of them as a faculty member. The concert includes Satu Matsui’s “Golden Rod” and contemporary composer Caroline Shaw’s “Three Essays: First Essay (Nimrod).”

The June 22 Artist Showcase, features performances by Hai-Ye Ni, principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and fellow faculty members performing Schubert’s Piano quintet in A Major (Trout). Oboist Nancy Ambrose King marks 20 years as a faculty artist in the June 23 concert “Traditions and Transformations,” a program that touches on three centuries of masterpieces.

For more information about the summer festival season: 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org/festival

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Young musicians share musical stories in 2023 Sarasota Music Festival