An Evening of Chamber Winds: Frost Wind Ensemble

A richly textured chamber program highlights the color, contrast and expressive range of wind instruments through an evening of intimate ensemble music. Featuring musicians from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on tour, the concert explores how distinct timbres converge across duos, trios, quintets and sextets.

The program spans more than a century of repertoire, from late 19th-century Romanticism to mid-20th-century modernism. Works by Maurice Emmanuel, Richard Strauss and Carl Czerny foreground lyrical dialogue between winds and piano, while André Jolivet’s Sonatine focuses on the raw, conversational edge of double reeds. Central to the evening are two large-scale works for winds: August Klughardt’s Quintet in C major, notable for its balanced writing across all five instruments, and Louise Farrenc’s Sextet in C minor, which expands the palette with piano and demands virtuosic interplay from the full ensemble.

Performers include pianist Michael Stephen Brown, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, oboist Juri Vallentin, clarinetist David Shifrin, bassoonist Peter Kolkay and horn player David Byrd-Marrow, bringing together leading voices in chamber performance.

WindFest: Chamber Music Series takes place Tuesday, March 3 at Newman Recital Hall at the Knight Center for Innovation. The concert is part of the Frost School of Music’s Signature Events lineup for the 2025-2026 season.