The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is proud to announce its 2021 season, which runs July 18–August 23. All concerts will be held in St. Francis Auditorium, at the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Keep reading below or click here to download a PDF.
Here are just some of the highlights we’re looking forward to next summer:
Alan Gilbert, Stefan Dohr, Leila Josefowicz
• Alan Gilbert, chief conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and former music director of the New York Philharmonic, leads two works for chamber orchestra—Takemitsu’s Rain Coming and Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks—and, as a violinist, joins Berlin Philharmonic Principal Horn Stefan Dohr and pianist Gilles Vonsattel in Ligeti’s Horn Trio.
• Stefan Dohr also performs Mozart’s Horn Quintet and Schubert’s Octet with an ensemble of Festival musicians.
• Violinist Paul Huang appears on five programs, including the season-opening concerts.
• Pianist Kirill Gerstein and violinist Leila Josefowicz are the featured soloists in Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with 13 Wind Instruments, led by David Robertson, the renowned former music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and former chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
• Composer, conductor, and chansonnier HK Gruber partners with Kirill Gerstein for songs by Weill and Eisler, and he performs one of his own works, Frankenstein!!, with a chamber orchestra led by Santa Fe Symphony Principal Conductor Guillermo Figueroa.
• Over the course of two concerts, Mark Kosower, principal cello of The Cleveland Orchestra, plays all six of Bach’s Solo Cello Suites.
• Five pianists—Kirill Gerstein, Zoltán Fejérvári, Gilles Vonsattel, Juho Pohjonen, and Nicolas Namoradze—appear in solo recitals.
• Pianist Haochen Zhang joins the Orion String Quartet and Dover Quartet for piano quintets by Dvořák and Shostakovich.
• The Festival gives world or US premieres of eight commissioned works, including string quartets by Augusta Read Thomas, Helen Grime, and the two participants in the Festival’s 2021 Young Composers String Quartet Project, Lara Poe and Jack Hughes, as well as pieces by Brett Dean, Sean Shepherd, Michael Seltenreich, and Huw Watkins. Watkins performs his new work—a duo for piano and percussion—with acclaimed percussionist Colin Currie.
• Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano and baritone Kelly Markgraf join clarinetist David Shifrin and the FLUX Quartet for the New Mexico premiere of Marc Neikrug’s chamber opera A Song by Mahler. The production is directed and designed by Doug Fitch and features lighting design by Nicholas Houfek.
• Artists making Festival debuts include conductor David Robertson; pianists Nicolas Namoradze and Huw Watkins; violinists William Hagen, Leila Josefowicz, and Amy Oshiro; percussionists Colin Currie and Jacob Nissly; and lighting designer Nicholas Houfek.
• Artists returning to the Festival include violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Eric Kim, flutists Tara Helen O’Connor and Joshua Smith, clarinetists Ricardo Morales and Romie de Guise-Langlois, bassoonist Christopher Millard, and the Miami String Quartet.
Details about the Festival’s free Youth Concerts and its first-ever Opening Weekend Celebration—a series of pre-season events that begins with a recital by pianist Wei Luo on Friday, July 16—will be announced at a later date.
2021 FESTIVAL PROGRAMS
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 |
| Week 4 | Week 5 | Finale |
2021 FESTIVAL ARTISTS
Click here to see the list of musicians joining us in 2021.
Current as of Tuesday, July 28, 2020
An Important Note about Tickets
It’s our plan to send subscribers their renewal packets and begin subscription renewals in early November. We also plan to begin individual ticket sales in mid-February.
Because of evolving social distancing guidelines, seat selection won’t be available until closer to the start of the Festival—on a date that’s still to be determined. We therefore encourage you (once subscription renewals begin and individual tickets go on sale) to place your orders at your earliest opportunity, so that you’ll be given priority in our system and have the best chance of securing your preferred seats.
