The Festival
The Concerts
Three renowned String Quartets – the Borromeo, the St. Lawrence and the Brentano along with pianists, Robert McDonald and Randall Hodgkinson perform in a series of programs during the summer. Michael Tree, violist and founding member of the Guarneri String Quartet, also performs during the festival. Performances are held at SMU-Fort Burgwin in Taos and seminars conducted by the faculty members are presented at the Hotel St. Bernard in Taos Ski Valley. These musicians also provide the highest level of coaching for the young artists. The faculty members do not teach the young musicians how to play, they are already playing at a professional level, but refine their skills and help them create music as part of a chamber music group.
Daniel Avshalomov, violist of the American String Quartet, says of Taos, "For the audience, they have the sense of being admitted to a kind of intimacy, in that they not only hear music being made but they can experience the process that makes it."
Student Concerts
Performing experience for students is of utmost importance. During the eight-week session each give four concerts as part of the School's Chamber Music Festival series held at SMU-Fort Burgwin in Taos and at the Hotel St. Bernard. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable audiences enhance the well attended student and faculty concerts. During the 2007 session, students who were attending the Cleveland Institute of Music, Colburn Conservatory of Music, Curtis, Juilliard, Mannes College of Music, New England Conservatory, Rice University, State University of New York, University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale and who came from the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, England, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Canada, performed works by Bartok, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Shostakovich to name a few.
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Young artists rehearsing