Fri 6/12 @ 7:30PM

Sat 6/13 @ 7:30PM

The nonprofit ENCORE Chamber Music Institute was founded in 2015 by violinist Jinjoo Cho, a frequent performer on local stages, to present the ENCORE Summer Academy to give pre-professional classical musicians from around the globe the chance to train with internationally noted musicians, and to present a series of public concerts  and community performances in Northeast Ohio, featuring world-class chamber musicians and performing artists; paired with community outreach performances throughout Northeast Ohio. This year’s theme is “Home.”

On Friday June 12 it presents a concert called “The American Dream Is for Perfect People,” taking place at Baldwin Wallace University’s Gamble Auditorium in Berea. It describes the evening as “a program of provocative contemporary composers [that] does not offer easy answers—instead, it asks us to listen deeply: to the music, to one another, and to the society we are shaping together.” It will include works by Charles Ives, Andy Akiho, Jacob TV and the centerpiece: Cleveland State University professor Andrew Rindfleisch’s 2025 composition, American Descent (2025), which was a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Its Saturday June 12 concert, “In Your Arms at Last,” at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls, they tell us, “explores the deep human longing to return to love and safety through music of devotion, intimacy, and transformation—from Wagner’s tender Siegfried Idyll, written as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima, to Beethoven and Schumann’s songs of devotion, culminating in Richard Strauss’s monumental Metamorphosen.”

Go here for tickets.

www.encorechambermusic.org/musicideasfestival