Tanglewood Learning Institute Closes Spring Season with The Birch Festival — When Voices Meet, Featuring the Borromeo String Quartet, Pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, and Violinist Yevgeny Kutik (Sat., May 9, 3 p.m.)

Tanglewood Learning Institute concludes its most ambitious spring season yet with TLI Presents: The Birch Festival — When Voices Meet, a concert celebrating how distinct voices learn to coexist, collaborate, and build something shared (Sat., May 9, 3 p.m.). Featuring the Borromeo String Quartet, pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, and violinist Yevgeny Kutik in both solo and chamber configurations, When Voices Meet offers an afternoon of music that celebrates difference not as division, but as the raw material of community. Tickets are available at tanglewood.org for the afternoon concert; a free open dress rehearsal at 10:30 a.m. the same morning is sold out.  

The program begins with pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, a Gilmore Young Artist and first prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, performing Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s virtuosic and rhythmic solo The Banjo. Gottschalk, a virtuoso pianist from New Orleans with a Creole mother and a Jewish father, helped shape an early American concert voice. The Borromeo String Quartet, Ensemble-in-Residence at New England Conservatory of Music, then offers trailblazing African American composer Florence Price’s Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint, which draws from and transforms spirituals from the Black American tradition. 

Acclaimed violinist and Birch Festival Artistic Director Yevgeny Kutik joins Sánchez-Werner for the Massachusetts premiere of Scattered Light, a new work by Jonathan Leshnoff for violin and piano commissioned by Newport Classical. The piece is inspired by George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, an affirmation of religious freedom that we still aspire to realize. Massachusetts Poet Laureate Regie Gibson will read both the letter from the Hebrew Congregation of Newport to President Washington and the president’s response.  

When Voices Meet culminates with all six musicians performing Ernest Chausson’s monumental Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet. With its unique chamber instrumentation, the brilliant and dramatic work is itself a metaphor for community building, as individual voices trade off listening, yielding, leading, and supporting.  

When Voices Meet marks TLI’s first collaboration with The Birch Festival, a nonprofit which brings world-leading musicians to work with Berkshire schools, local business, and in tandem with cultural partnerships for a twice-a-year classical music festival. For more information on The Birch Festival, visit their website. 

Following When Voices Meet and the conclusion of the spring season, TLI activity resumes on Wednesday, July 1 with the first of more than 70 programs this summer. Highlights include the annual Spotlight Series, Talks and Walks led by Anthony Fogg, Audubon Tours, Focal Point photography classes, and a new course, Arts and the Rule of Law, led by Juilliard’s Lesley Rosenthal. Click here for upcoming TLI programs. 

Quote from Yevgeny Kutik, Artistic Director and co-founder of The Birch Festival:  

“I’m thrilled for this spring’s Birch Festival to unfold in collaboration with the Tanglewood Learning Institute. From the beginning, Birch has been about making world-class music-making inviting and accessible for the Berkshires community, and TLI feels like an especially fitting partner in that spirit. This program brings together an extraordinary group of artists and works, each with its own history, sound, and perspective, coming into conversation with one another to build something larger. 

“Particularly exciting for me is the chance to give the second-ever performance of a new work by Jonathan Leshnoff, inspired by George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport—a remarkable statement of religious freedom and human dignity at the very beginning of American democracy. The letter’s message, that this country should give ‘to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,’ still feels both profound and urgent. Jonathan’s piece reflects those ideals with great depth and beauty, and I’m honored that Birch and TLI can help bring that message to life through music.”