Summer is Vermont’s finest season — at least if your measure is chamber music. Its practitioners fairly swarm the state from June through August, playing at festivals and concert series that span the length and breadth of the Green Mountains and environs. Here are seven not to miss.
Adamantly Local
The Anne Wasily and Vira Kolisch Music Experience concert series takes place in idyllic Adamant, an unincorporated village of Calais and a beautiful drive from anywhere on a summer day. This year’s five concerts, coordinated by New York City-based pianist Adam Tendler, feature him and four other staples of the Vermont classical scene: the Champlain Trio (Letitia Quante, violin; Emily Taubl, cello; Hiromi Fukuda, piano), pianists Paul Orgel and Michael Arnowitt, and TURNmusic. Tendler, from Barre, earned a 2019 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists. For the acclaimed Inheritances, he commissioned 16 of new music’s starriest composers; a recording on New Amsterdam Records came out in 2024.
The Anne Wasily and Vira Kolisch Music Experience, June 14, June 28, July 19, August 9 and August 30, 6 p.m., at Frank Suchomel Memorial Arts Center & QuarryWorks in Adamant. Free. fsmac-quarryworks.org
Hop to It
The main focus of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival is its 200-plus dedicated young string students, who practice for hours a day at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester. But many of the festival’s offerings are open to the public.
At Elley-Long Music Center, faculty and invited artists perform in an eight-concert series on Tuesdays and Fridays. This year’s visiting quartets are the energizing Balourdet Quartet and the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet. Locals can also hear the students give recitals, or surprise shoppers with live music at “quartet hops” on July 12 and 19 on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace. Elsewhere, catch a master class with eminent cellist Norman Fischer and informative “conversations” about aspects of the music with Vermont choral director Nathaniel Lew.
Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, June 29 through August 3 at Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester and other venues. Free to $50. gmcmf.org
Play On, Players
Craftsbury Chamber Players have hosted visiting and Vermont chamber musicians annually since 1966. In place of lectures and master classes, music director and cellist Fran Rowell provides extensive program notes and leads casual preconcert talks by the musicians. The group, which includes Fran’s violinist sister, Mary Rowell, will perform six concerts on Wednesdays at Colchester’s Elley-Long Music Center and repeat those programs on Thursdays at the Hardwick Town House. The Players tend to lean on enduring masterworks while adding one new piece per program. This year, they’ll feature violist Kenji Bunch’s “The Viola Burns Longer” (2024) for solo viola, piano and string quartet; and pianist Inessa Zaretsky’s “Songs” (2025) for alto voice, viola and piano.
Craftsbury Chamber Players, Wednesdays, July 9 to August 13, at Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester; and Thursdays, July 10 to August 14, at Hardwick Town House. $10-25. ccpvt.org
Well Read
Manchester Music Festival‘s 51st season, “Music and Storytelling,” will draw a literary crowd as much as a musical one. One of its five Thursday-night concerts traces the literary connections of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata — which inspired poems by Rita Dove, a novella by Leo Tolstoy and Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1. An entire musical-theatrical work inspired by the Faust story caps the season: Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat, with film actor David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck) as the soldier and soprano Christine Goerke as the devil. Other eminences on the program include former Emerson String Quartet violinist Philip Setzer, now in his second year as the festival’s artistic director; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers; and baritone Randall Scarlata singing six poems by Powers that composer Perry Goldstein set to music and premiered in 2022.
Manchester Music Festival, July 10 through August 7, at Arkell Pavilion at Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester and other venues. $15-80. mmfvt.org
Go Deep
Musicians and audiences alike revere the Marlboro Music Festival, led by co-artistic directors and pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss. Acclaimed “senior artists” and emerging prodigies live for seven weeks on the former Marlboro College campus and explore jointly chosen repertoire in practically unlimited depth. They perform on five festival weekends, announcing the program on short notice. This year’s roster of 75 musicians includes cellist Judith Serkin, daughter of the late pianist Rudolf Serkin, who cofounded Marlboro in 1951. Many Marlboro attendees cross-pollinate with the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (see below), including soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Indian American composer Reena Esmail.
Marlboro Music Festival, weekends, July 19 through August 17, at Persons Auditorium in Marlboro. $5-40. marlboromusic.org
Party Central
Cellist Peter Sanders founded the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival 32 years ago and has been its artistic director ever since. The Big Apple native plays in the New York City Ballet and Orchestra Lumos of Stamford, Conn. This year’s three concerts — one featuring Vermont pianist Claire Black — are interspersed with encore performances, open rehearsals and a master class by the Dalí Quartet, Chamber Music America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year. The group will perform contemporary Jamaican British composer Eleanor Alberga’s String Quartet No. 1; Sanders will join them for the beloved Franz Schubert String Quintet in C Major. The final concert features music by Sanders’ fellow New Yorker Nico Muhly, who, like him, spent childhood summers in Vermont. Muhly’s two brief choral works on the program are transposed for string sextet: “Oculi Omnium I & II” and the wistful “God Will Be Their Light.”
Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival, August 4 through 16, Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph and other venues. Free to $27. cvcmf.org
Rock Me, Amadeus
Hearing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is like being in the presence of divinity, as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky once noted. The latter wrote his orchestral suite Mozartiana as a tribute to Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni. This season’s Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival continues the adoration under the rubric of “Mozartiana: The Creative Phenomenon,” artistic-directed by Soovin Kim and Gloria Chien. Four main concerts explore Mozart and his influence, pairing him with such composers as Felix Mendelssohn, dubbed “the Mozart of the 19th century”; and Caroline Shaw, whose 2009 “Punctum” for string quartet plays with classical forms. Expect to become deeply informed from talks by resident composer David Serkin Ludwig and Yale University history of music associate professor Paul Berry, master classes with the Parker Quartet, and more. The opening day of the festival features a screening of Miloš Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus, presented in partnership with the Vermont International Film Foundation.
Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, August 16 to 24, Elley-Long Arts Center in Colchester and other venues. $5-49. lccmf.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “In Concert | Seven Vermont chamber music events not to miss this summer”
This article appears in The Summer Preview 2025.
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