Schubert is Focus of Winter Festival at CMS this January and February

7 Concerts | 31 Artists

January 22 to February 12

Including

Vocalists Nikolay Borchev, Jennifer Johnson Cano and Joélle Harvey Orion String Quartet and Escher String Quartet

New York, NY: January 9, 2023 -- This year’s Winter Festival at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS), from January 22 to February 12, celebrates the creative career of Franz Schubert and his lasting legacy, as seen in the composers who followed him. The concerts feature Schubert’s masterful and influential song cycles, lieder, and chamber music, as well as one program exploring how later composers have been inspired by his work.

“He was a young man with all of this ambition,” said CMS Artistic Director David Finckel, “waking up to the fact that he did not want to be known just for little pieces like songs and miniatures [following his then-fatal diagnosis of syphilis at age 25]. To leave a lasting legacy and be more on par with other renowned composers, he needed to write larger-scale compositions, including substantial chamber works. We want to show how Schubert forced himself to become a mature composer before his time. He was writing music in his late 20s with the kind of sophistication and depth that artists don’t usually attain until their 50s and 60s. He had a selfaccelerated maturity unlike anyone else’s.”

The Festival opens on January 22 with one of Schubert’s late masterworks: Schubert’s seminal and intensely somber song cycle Winterreise, for which CMS Artistic Director and pianist Wu Han is joined by the young Berlin-based baritone Nikolay Borchev in his only New York appearance this season. The program concludes with Beethoven’s last quartet (and his last full work in any genre), performed by the Orion String Quartet, which recently announced it would retire at the end of the 2023-24 season; this is one of their last appearances in New York.