In a year of major transitions, Sarasota Music Festival offers promising new concerts

It’s the 57th year for the Sarasota Music Festival, but it’s not just any year.

Paul Wolfe, the revered founder of the festival, a man who was intimately involved with each festival from the beginning, passed away in September. So this year’s festival will be the first without Wolfe’s imprint.

The festival is also welcoming a new musical director. Jeffrey Kahane, who’s the artistic director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and who has a national reputation as a pianist and conductor, has taken the creative reins of the festival.

“I think when we look back, this will prove to be a historic year for the Sarasota Music Festival,” said RoseAnne McCabe, the festival’s longtime administrative director.

Wolfe will definitely be missed, festival officials say. He developed the festival from the ground up, as a way to provide excellent education for the upcoming generation of musicians and to provide opportunities for summer concerts, at a time when the Sarasota area didn’t have much going on in the summer. He stayed actively involved with the festival up through last year, until just a few months before his death.

The festival has grown in prestige for more than half a century. Hundreds of the finest young musicians from around the world applied this year for 60 positions in the three-week festival. Only the best apply, and only the best of those are accepted.

For three weeks, they do nothing but take classes, rehearse and perform with some of the elite professionals in the art form.

“It’s an intense three weeks” said Joe McKenna, the president and CEO of the Sarasota Orchestra, which organizes the festival. “They spend those three weeks creating the magical experience of music.”

Students at the festival have gone on to join some of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, McKenna said, and, in fact, every major orchestra in the United States probably has at least 10 alumni of the Sarasota Music Festival.

From an audience perspective, most of the elements that have made the festival so popular remain in place, including the rehearsals and master classes that let classical music lovers watch music being made and young artists developing their craft.

But Kahane has tweaked the concert offerings a bit. There will be more concerts with the festival faculty playing alongside the young musicians, including a performance of all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

“It’s the first time all of the Brandenburg Concertos have been performed together, definitely at the festival and maybe in Sarasota,” McCabe said.

The concertos are the kind of pieces that appeal even to people who aren’t devoted classical music fans, and they’re familiar to most people.

“Even if you think you don’t know the Brandenburg Concertos, you probably do,” McCabe said.

Even with all six concertos on the program, the concert’s only about two hours long, McCabe said

Other concerts that will have broad appeal are Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (June 10) and the festival’s first-ever concert by guest artists. A New York ensemble called yMusic that’s known for virtuosity and expanding the boundaries of classic music will perform June 23 at the Sarasota Opera House.

The festival features 13 concerts in all, including several chamber programs.

Details: Performances June 8-24, various locations in Sarasota. $10 and up. 941-953-3434, sarasotaorchestra.org.

This story was originally published June 2, 2017 at 5:13 PM with the headline "In a year of major transitions, Sarasota Music Festival offers promising new concerts."