From the directors:

We the directors of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival are proud to bring our 11th season of beautiful, extraordinary, and exploratory music to central Virginia.  Having toured the world -- performing, hearing, studying, and seeking music -- we are happy to present the finest of what we can find (along with a touch of the unknown) each year in our hometown of Charlottesville.

Chamber music, with its unique combination of intimacy and breadth, brings us the opportunity to present a new essay each year on the unending possibilities of music, and allows us to do so in the happy form of a festival.  Every year brings for us a new wealth of content to explore -- ideas of the local and global, of the present and past, and of Europe and America, for example.  But even more than that, each year gives us the privilege of bringing our sounds, senses, and ideas back home to Virginia, where they can come to life amidst the strong energy and sustenance of friends and family.  We hope you will join us with our friends from around the world (all of whom come to feel at home here in Charlottesville) for our annual set of September concerts.

The season begins with a program of music from Vienna, tracing its incomparable musical history from Beethoven to Berg.  The second concert turns toward France, with unusual and magical music for harp (plus a joyful clarinet note from American Steve Reich).  The third begins with the early modernism of Stravinsky and ends with improvisation (featuring also a fin-de-siècle setting of The Masque of the Red Death, from UVa’s own Edgar Allan Poe).  The fourth concert brings the icy stability of Sibelius and Shostakovich; and the last brings us almost back to Vienna, with two masterpieces from Mozart and Brahms, and two beautiful piano works from American musical pioneers John Cage and John Adams. 

We will be joined by musicians from England, Scotland, Finland, Romania, Holland, France, and Germany, as well as by a host of Americans from Boston, New York, Arizona, and Florida.  

It should be quite a trip.  We look forward to seeing you in September.

Sincerely,

	Raphael Bell Co-director		Timothy Summers Co-director