Carnegie Hall

Ensemble Connect

The talented young musicians who make up Ensemble Connect have been called “one of the strongest ensembles in the city” by the New York Classical Review. They are fellows in a two-year program that prepares them for careers as daring performers, dedicated teachers, and advocates for music that spans the Baroque to the present day. They display their virtuosity and sense of adventure in a program that features a new work by Gabriella Smith, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and more.

Ensemble Connect

Ensemble Connect, “the new face of classical music for New York” (The New York Times), performs a rarely heard masterpiece of the Romantic era and more. Brahms was not one to offer effusive praise, but even he had kind words for Dvořák’s sextet, citing its “infinite beauty” and “marvelous inventiveness, freshness, and gorgeous sound.” Dvořák looked to Brahms’s sextets for inspiration, but he lightened the German master’s serious tone with lively Slavic folk accents in a wonderfully expressive work.

Ensemble Connect

Ensemble Connect energizes audiences with its fresh approach to programming and exuberant performances. Deeply committed to music of living composers, Ensemble Connect's program features John Adams’s lively Chamber Symphony. Adams was studying a score of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 at his home when the sounds of the Saturday morning cartoons his son was watching poured into his room. The hyperactive styles of both came together in this marvelously inventive and witty work.

Ensemble Connect

Whether it’s a masterpiece from the early Baroque or a cutting-edge work commissioned by Carnegie Hall, there doesn’t seem to be anything the adventurous young musicians of Ensemble Connect can’t play. They feature one of the treasures of 20th-century chamber music on this program, Ravel’s intoxicating Piano Trio in A Minor. The four-movement work derives much of its charm from the Basque-influenced rhythms that flow through the first movement and gorgeous Baroque-styled Passacaille of its penultimate movement.