NEW YORK — The theme of the 2026 Chelsea Music Festival, its 17th season, was “Every Story Counts.” In introducing the June 26 program of new chamber music at St. Paul’s German Church, festival co-founder and artistic director Ken-David Masur explained that it was a reference to the phrase “Every Vote Counts,” the festival’s way of acknowledging America’s 250th birthday. Indeed, there were plenty of stories on hand as five gifted composers shared new pieces.
The program was titled Shelters in the Desert, inspired by the name of the opening work, Desert Shelter, a string sextet by J.E. Hernández. Described by the composer as recounting “stories of migrants who cross the Sonoran Desert,” the haunting and imaginative piece was premiered in 2023. While it’s unusual to see a conductor lead only six players (two each on violin, viola, and cello, and all members of the Chelsea Music Festival Orchestra), Masur’s presence was surely helpful in keeping this rhythmically and texturally complex tone poem on its track.
The piece evoked the desert’s many aspects: its violent storms, its beauty, its dangerous heat, its lonesomeness. The festival has long used the slogan “Hear, Taste, See” to indicate a commitment to combining musical and visual arts (plus tasty food and drink at post-concert receptions). For Desert Shelter, the composer stood at a laptop and controlled designer Yslas’ abstract, flame-like animations so they pulsed and moved with the music. Unfortunately, the evening sun streaming through the upper church windows made the projections difficult to see.
By the time the Lee Trio (violinist Alina Ming Kobialka, cellist Angela Lee, and pianist and festival co-founder Melinda Lee Masur) started the world premiere of William Susman’s Clouds and Flames, the sun had set, allowing us to wonder at striking images of Spencer Finch’s Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, a wall-length installation at the National September 11 Memorial Museum.
Susman’s piece is two simultaneous takes on the World Trade Center towers: Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between them and the horrific terrorist act of September 2001. Organized as seven short, programmatically titled movements, Clouds and Flames is an affecting exploration of physical and emotional states. “Riding Toward Oblivion” starts with a steady bowed beat that hesitates and restarts, only to become a repeating upward scale as if trying to reach the tower’s top. “Floating on Air” uses quiet triplets to give a sense of groundlessness; this is the first of several movements that rely on perpetual motion. “The Alphabet of Dying” is founded on a simple, muted melody that the composer treats stylistically as a cross between a children’s song and a chorale.
The New York premiere of Ania Vu’s Water Realms provided welcome relief from the church’s summer heat. For this, the entire orchestra assembled onstage. As the projection showed Firelei Bàez’s watercolor of a raging sea imprinted with the insignia of a mental hospital, Vu’s work took us into vivid imagery. The sections sounded like a raging seastorm (thanks to percussionist Oliver Xu), the calm that follows (featuring bassoonist Hannah Dickerson), the threat of more unsteady weather (effectively indicated by the flutter-tonguing of flutist Catherine Boyack), and a shamelessly Romantic violin line (concertmaster Jonathan Ong) like a beam of light shooting through clear water.
Speaking of shameless Romanticism, Grigory Smirnov’s 2022 Impromptu for violin solo and string orchestra could have been written by César Franck. Smirnov seemed to be channeling that moment just at the cusp of early French modernism. In this New York premiere, solo violinist Kobialka plunged eagerly into the musical lushness, creating an impossibly sweet tone with a tight vibrato. Despite technical challenges such as upward shifts that nearly took her past the fingerboard and quick passages of double-stops, her intonation was always exact, and that silky sound remained smooth. Conductor Masur and the strings supported her with balanced richness. Jen Hitchings’ folkart-like oil painting Mystery Temple (Laurel Canyon) was visually appealing if not an obvious match to the music.
The program’s final work was a movement from Masur’s world-premiere string-orchestra arrangement of a 2009 string quartet: Tania León’s Esencia. Each of the quartet’s movements is inspired by a particular perfume. The composer came onstage beforehand to give a delightful explanation of the scent called Agua de Florida, which she described as such a common, everyday scent that “you can find it in any bodega”; when she was growing up in Cuba, her family would mix it into the water to wash floors, so the whole house would take on its fragrance.
In the wake of that lighthearted tale, the “Agua de Florida” movement felt surprisingly heavy, busy, and serious. Its layers of Latin and Caribbean syncopation were well crafted but seemed to flummox the orchestra slightly; they played with less confidence than they had demonstrated in the other pieces. The work’s intricacy was well reflected in the artwork being projected. Bàez’s Zemi (A New Spelling of my Name) is a brightly colored painting of a seated goddess holding a bouquet of flowers and fruits so huge that only her legs are visible; the backdrop is a 19th-century European pen-and-ink rendering of jungle caves in Taíno territory — the irrepressibly vivid indigenous culture outshines the colonialist’s understanding, one story fighting for prominence over another.
Although the Chelsea Music Festival wrapped up June 27, you can see plenty of excerpts from past programs as well as special online-only projects on its YouTube channel.
