Summer beckons! We see a shining a path—a musical yellow brick road, if you will—to our 53^rd Summer Festival that’s overflowing with music for FIVE WEEKS starting on June 24!

Our Poetry in Music festival this summer illuminates the intimate connection between poetry, storytelling, and chamber music. Artistic Directors Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim have created a festival celebrating the confluence of these art forms by drawing on selections with lyrical themes alongside classical repertoire and new music by living composers.

There’s all kinds of chamber music in this year’s festival! We have a mighty range of instruments played by some of the very best musicians in the world, who are performing pieces written by legendary long-passed AND very alive composers. We hope that’s enticing enough to spend some time with us this summer in our land of musical Oz!

Let’s take a quick walk through wonders…

Music is Poetry, and Poetry is Music. Explore the intimate connection between poetry and music with renowned vocalists Fleur Barron, Susanna Phillips, and Hyunah Yu inhabiting the lyricism of Schubert, Fauré, Robert Schumann, and Brahms, and the storytelling of The Anchoress. Enjoy the world premiere of Wang Jie’s delightfully unique and entertaining Blame the Obituary, narrated by Portland-native and American Public Media’s Performance Today host, Fred Child, and experience an array of poetically-inspired music and musically-inspired poetry.

Celebrating America’s Greatest String Quartet. After 17 appearances with us over a span of 30 years, the nine-time Grammy Award-winning Emerson Quartet takes their final bows in two glorious concerts. In addition to their inspired performance as a quartet of Beethoven’s and Bartók’s masterworks, they will also perform with their great friend and CMNW Artistic Director Emeritus David Shifrin, and with Artistic Director Gloria Chien.

Musical Masters of Today. This summer, we welcome many of America’s most acclaimed and influential musical artists to CMNW—many for the first time! They include groundbreaking clarinetist Anthony McGill, the Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet, the mesmerizing Metropolitan Opera soprano Susanna Phillips, acclaimed pianist and composer Stewart Goodyear, and the extraordinary new musician/composer collective umama womama.

The Greatest Chamber Music Ever Written. Even the best have their best: Bach’s soaring Magnificat; Beethoven’s cathartic Opus 131; Brahms’s supreme Clarinet Quintet and Piano Quartet No. 2; Schubert’s sublime The Shepherd on the Rock; Mozart’s miraculous Piano Concerto No. 12; Amy Beach’s ravishing Piano Quintet; and Robert Schumann’s irrepressibly joyous Piano Quintet, just to name a few. You’ll be swept into a musical reverie with an abundance of the greatest chamber works ever conceived, performed by some of the world’s finest chamber musicians.

Be In the Room When It Happens! Take your seat to be among the first listeners for the music of the moment—and the artists of the future. We'll premiere 12 new works—eight commissions—and explore the music of emerging and leading composers of today, including: Chris Rogerson, Patrick Castillo, Aiden Kane, David Serkin Ludwig, Wang Jie, Alistair Coleman, and CMNW Protégé composer Kian Ravaei. Plus, marvel at the talent and virtuosity of our Protégé Artists and Young Artist Institute Fellows, who are among the brightest rising star musicians of the future.

Plus there’s three free outdoor concerts to enjoy! Please consider yourself warmly invited to come celebrate the diversity of classical music with us this summer—let us enliven and expand your musical palette!

FIVE WEEKS ● 60 MUSICIANS ● FIVE VENUES ● 35 EVENTS

EXPLORE THE FESTIVAL at cmnw.org!