The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival brings together the world’s finest musicians to perform classical chamber music in all its forms. Founded in 1972, the Festival has reigned among the world’s leading performing arts festivals for more than half a century, earning both critical praise and dedicated audiences for its lasting commitment to tradition, innovation, and artistic excellence.

Our 2025–26 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series offers a varied selection of superbly recorded performances captured during the Festival’s 2024 summer season. Each program, hosted by Kerry Frumkin and produced by Louise Frank, includes insightful dialogue with the Festival’s musicians and with its Artistic Director, Marc Neikrug.

Week 1: Ligeti & Dvořák Quintets

The 2025 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series embarks with two very different quintets: Six Bagatelles, an enchanting wind quintet that György Ligeti composed in 1953, and Antonín Dvořák’s 1887 celebration of all things Czech, the Piano Quintet in A Major. Flutist Bart Feller finds Ligeti’s collection of concise pieces quite charming and says, “Later in Ligeti’s career, he was very complicated and biting in the harmonies. These bagatelles sound like folk material that you would hear in the Hungarian hills.” Dvořák’s Opus 81, one of the most beloved pieces in the chamber music world, marks a first-time collaboration between the esteemed pianist Kirill Gerstein and the critically acclaimed Dover Quartet.

György Ligeti (1923–2006): Six Bagatelles for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Horn (1953)
Allegro con spirito
Rubato. Lamentoso
Allegro grazioso
Presto ruvido
Adagio. Mesto (Béla Bartók in memoriam)
Molto vivace. Capriccioso

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904): Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 (1887)
Allegro ma non tanto
Dumka: Andante con moto
Scherzo (Furiant): Molto vivace
Finale: Allegro

Week 2: Lully & Rachmaninoff Trios

In this program, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival presents a Baroque trio sonata meant to lull a king to slumber, and a huge Romantic piano trio written in memory of a great composer. We’ll hear selections from Trios pour le coucher du roi, music Lully wrote, in 1679, for chamber musicians to play while Louis XIV prepared for bed. The hour concludes with Rachmaninoff’s Trio élégiaque in D Minor, a beautiful and haunting youthful work which memorializes Rachmaninoff’s mentor and friend, Tchaikovsky.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87): Trios pour le coucher du roi, LWV 35 (c. 1679)
Symphonie
Sarabande
Menuet
Chaconne

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943): Trio élégiaque in D Minor for Piano Trio, Op. 9 (1893, rev. 1907, 1917)
Moderato
Quasi variazione
Allegro risoluto—Moderato

Week 3: Brahms & Mozart

For the masterful clarinetist David Shifrin, Mozart’s 1789 Clarinet Quinet sets “a standard that has never been surpassed for great music for the clarinet.” In this edition of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series, David Shifrin joins forces with the Escher String Quartet. Escher cellist Brook Speltz tells us, “I have no problem being hyperbolic about the Mozart Clarinet Quintet and I would extend that to David Shifrin, too. I don’t think there’s an artist out there who could touch that piece the way he does, and for us, it was one of the honors of a lifetime to play that piece with that man.” The hour begins as violinist Cho-Liang Lin and pianist Jon Kimura Parker play the Sonata in A Major, a good natured, mature work created by Johannes Brahms, in 1886, at the zenith of his creative powers.

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 100 (1886)
Allegro amabile
Andante tranquillo–Vivace
Allegretto grazioso (quasi andante)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791): Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581 (1789)
Allegro
Larghetto
Menuetto
Allegretto con variazioni

Week 4: Verdi & Bartók String Quartets

Week four of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 2025 radio series features two extraordinary string quartets. The Verona Quartet performs Giuseppe Verdi’s sole chamber work, the String Quartet in E Minor. He wrote it in Naples, in 1873, during a production delay of his opera Aida. Praising Verdi’s operatic sound world, the Verona’s violist Abigail Rojansky said, “We get extreme pain, sadness, and tenderness, and somehow he also finds these moments of just pure celebration.” After the Verdi, the Escher String Quartet delivers the iconic String Quartet No. 5, music Bartók composed in 1934. The Escher String Quartet met as students at the Manhattan School of Music, in 2005, and the ensemble came into their own through the process of mastering this incredibly difficult work of great power and depth.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901): String Quartet in E Minor (1873)
Allegro
Andantino
Prestissimo
Scherzo Fuga: Allegro assai mosso

Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945): String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102 (1934)
Allegro
Adagio molto
Scherzo
Andante
Finale

Week 5: Handel & Hermann

Enjoy two English-infused works composed 250 years apart. Harry Bicket, music director at the Santa Fe Opera and director of the English Consort in London, plays the harpsichord while leading a group of Santa Fe Opera Orchestra musicians. They play the D and G Major Suites from Water Music, which Handel composed to entertain a royal river party. The hour also holds music by the American anglophile Bernard Herrmann, who created many mid-20th century Hollywood film scores. Herrmann penned his final concert piece, Souvenirs de Voyage, a cinematic journey through England, Ireland, and Italy, while living in England in 1967. Todd Levy, principal clarinet for the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony, brings this evocative and pastoral work to life in collaboration with violinists Ida Kavafian and L.P. How, violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Eric Kim.

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL: Water Music Suite in D Major and G Major, HWV 349–350 (c. 1717)
Overture
Minuet
Rigaudon 1 & 2
Lentement
Bourrée
Minuet 1 & 2
Country Dance 1 & 2
Alla Hornpipe

BERNARD HERRMANN: Souvenirs de Voyage for Clarinet Quintet (1967)
Andante pastorale – Allegro
Berceuse
Andante tranquillo quasi barcarolla

Week 6: Rameau & Brahms

From French Baroque to masterly Romantic, week six of the 2025 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series brings together works by Jean Philippe Rameau and Johannes Brahms. Brahms began to write what would eventually become his Piano Quintet in F Minor when he was in his late 20s and still living in his native Hamburg. Thanks in part to advice from Clara Schumann, he revised the combination of instruments various times until he achieved the perfect balance of power and lyricism. Artistic director Marc Neikrug assembled a Festival super group to perform the Quintet. We have Kirill Gerstein on piano. William Hagen and LP How play violins. The superb Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt is the violist, and Paul Watkins plays cello. The hour begins with the first of Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concerts in a performance by violinist Yura Lee, cellist Peter Stumpf, and harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon.

JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU: Concert No. 1 in C Minor from Pièces de clavecin en concerts for Violin, Cello, and Harpsichord (1741)
La Coulicam
La Livri
Le Vészinet

JOHANNES BRAHMS: Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 (1861-64)
Allegro non troppo
Andante, un poco adagio
Scherzo: Allegro
Finale: Poco sostenuto – Allegro non troppo

Week 7: Williams & Weinberg

Violinist Cho-Liang Lin and pianist Jon Kimura Parker open this Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival broadcast with the Theme from Schindler’s List, music John Williams composed for the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie. This nostalgic and achingly beautiful piece captures perfectly the sense of what was lost in the Holocaust, and it has become one of Williams’s most frequently performed concert works. The hour culminates with Mieczysław Weinberg’s haunting Piano Quintet, a courageous, expressive, and virtuosic ensemble piece the Polish-born composer wrote, in 1944, while living in exile in Soviet Russia. Delivering a stellar performance of this rarely heard masterpiece are Katia Skanavi, piano; John Storgårds and Ida Kavafian, violins; Steven Tenenbom, viola; and Eric Kim, cello.

JOHN WILLIAMS: Theme from Schindler’s List (1993)

MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG: Piano Quintet, Op. 18 (1944)
Moderato con moto
Allegretto
Presto
Largo
Allegro agitato

Week 8: Schumann & Schubert

“A Trio by Schubert passed across the musical world like some angry comet in the sky.” So wrote Robert Schumann about Franz Schubert’s 1827 tribute to Beethoven, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major. This edition of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series features Schubert’s symphonic yet delicate and transparent trio in a performance by pianist Gilles Vonsattel, violinist Paul Huang, and cellist Peter Stumpf. First, though, pianist George Li, the silver medalist in the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition and winner of the prestigious 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, plays Schumann’s 1838 Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18.

ROBERT SCHUMANN: Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18 (1838-39)

FRANZ SCHUBERT: Piano Trio in E-flat Major, D. 929 (1827)
Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzando. Allegro moderato
Allegro moderato

Week 9: Giuliani & Bartók

In this musical hour from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, we bring you a pair of dazzling duos. Violinist Yura Lee and pianist George Li join forces to perform the Violin Sonata No. 1 that Béla Bartók composed, in 1921, as he, and the world around him, began to recover from the First World War. Juxtaposing the Bartók, the broadcast opens with international guitar sensation Łukasz Kuropaczewski and violinist Danbi Um. They play the genial Grand duo concertante in A Major that the Italian composer Maura Giuliani crafted in 1817.

MAURO GIULIANI: Grand duo concertante in A Major for Violin and Guitar, Op. 85 (ca. 1817)
Allegro maestoso
Andante molto sostenuto
Scherzo: Vivace
Allegretto espressivo

BÉLA BARTÓK: Sonata No. 1 in C-sharp Minor for Violin and Piano, Sz. 75 (1921)
Allegro appassionato
Adagio
Allegro molto

Week 10: Prokofiev & 

Tchaikovsky

Join us for two Russian masterworks performed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Prokofiev’s Flute Sonata, from 1943, features a virtuoso interpretation by flutist Tara Helen O’Connor in collaboration with pianist Ran Dank. To close out the program, the Dover Quartet plays a landmark composition by Tchaikovsky, the Quartet in D Major, Op. 11, whose famous second movement was said to move the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to tears.  

SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Sonata in D Major for Flute and Piano, Op. 94 (1943)
Moderato
Scherzo
Andante
Allegro con brio

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: String Quartet in D Major, Op. 11 (1871)
Moderato e semplice
Andante cantabile
Scherzo: Allegro non tanto e con fuoco
Finale: Allegro giusto

Week 11: Bach & Golijov

Pianist Gilles Vonsattel opens this Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival program with J. S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E Major, a sextet for keyboard and strings that’s both lighthearted and full of challenging complexity. The concerto, which dates from approximately 1738, premiered at a Leipzig coffeehouse as part of a music series the composer ran there for more than a decade. We then come to 1994 and Osvaldo Golijov’s celebrated quintet for clarinet and strings, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Clarinetist Todd Palmer has worked with Golijov many times. Here, he joins the Verona Quartet in this epic musical journey that invokes both the divinity of prayer and the freewheeling world of klezmer. Sharing her discoveries at playing the piece for the first time, the Verona Quartet’s violist Abigail Rojansky observes, “The way that Golijov writes is so masterful, so interwoven, and so deeply, deeply characterful. Every little detail is so interesting and fun to play.”

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1053 (c. 1738-39)
Allegro
Siciliano
Allegro

OSVALDO GOLIJOV: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994)
Prelude: Calmo, sospeso
Agitato – Con fuoco – Maestoso – Senza misura, oscilante
Teneramente – Ruvido – Presto
Calmo, sospeso – Allegro pesante
Postlude: Lento, liberamente

Week 12: Zelenka & Dvorák

The harmonic inventiveness of two pivotal Czech composers fills this hour from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. In describing the baroque composer Zelenka, a critic once remarked that it’s as if Bach had a touch of Ives in him. Celebrated musicians performing Zelenka’s Trio Sonata for Oboe, Bassoon, Violin, and Continuo include principal oboe of the Minnesota Orchestra, Nathan Hughes; Principal Bassoon of the National Symphony Orchestra, Sue Heineman; violinist William Hagen, cellist Alastair Eng, and longtime Santa Fe harpsichordist, Kathleen McIntosh. To close out the program, the Calidore String Quartet joins forces with violist Toby Appel and cellist Peter Stumpf. They’ll perform Dvorák’s one and only String Sextet. Written in 1878, the sextet marked a turning point in the up-and-coming composer’s career, as he successfully brought the lively melodies and dances of his Bohemian homeland into the concert hall, blending the spirit of Czech folk tradition with art music.

JAN DISMAS ZELENKA: Trio Sonata No. 3 in B-flat Major for Oboe, Bassoon, Violin, and Continuo, ZWV 181/3 (1720-21)
Adagio
Allegro
Largo
Allegro. Tempo giusto

ANTONÍN DVORÁK: String Sextet in A Major, Op. 48 (1878)
Allegro moderato
Dumka (Elegie): Poco allegretto
Furiant: Presto
Finale: Tema con variazioni

Week 13: Mendelssohn, Janáček & Wolf

The culminating episode of the 2025 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series holds music by Wolf, Janáček, and Mendelssohn. To begin, baritone Benjamin Appl sings of a yearning for a distant loved one when he and pianist Simon Lepper perform the song “Silent Love” from Wolf’s Eichendorff Lieder. After that, violinist John Storgårds and pianist Kirill Gerstein play Janácek’s World War I era Sonata for Violin and Piano, a work noted for both its urgency and lyricism. When we asked John about the modal harmonies and improvisational feel of Janácek’s music, he observed that “it’s full of fantasy and very Janáček-typical colors, and a certain folkish world that is so special for him.” Lastly, pianist Jon Kimura Parker, violinist Yura Lee, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan bring the full season of performances from Santa Fe to its triumphant conclusion with their delivery of Mendelssohn’s superlative D Minor Piano Trio, which Schumann called “the master trio of our time.”

HUGO WOLF: “Verschwiegene Liebe” (“Silent Love”) from Eichendorff Lieder (1880-1888)

LEOŠ JANÁČEK: Sonata for Violin and Piano (1914-22)
Con moto
Ballada
Allegretto
Adagio

FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 49 (1839)
Molto allegro ed agitato
Andante con molto tranquillo
Scherzo: Leggiero e vivace
Finale: Allegro assai appassionato

Host: Kerry Frumkin

Producer: Louise Frank

Recording Engineer: Matt Snyder of Allegro Recordings

The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.