The Octet: David Bernat, Claire Bourg, Jacques Forestier, Rannveig Marta Sarc, Brian Hong, Cara Pogossian, Alexander Hersh, Edvard Pogossian

Late summer means it’s time for Guarneri Hall’s annual Nexus Chamber Music Festival, which will kick off the venue’s 2026-27 season August 12-14.

“This is our ninth year,” says Guarneri Hall founder and artistic director Stefan Hersh. “Nexus has been our resident ensemble the whole time. They do a lot of stuff with us during the year as well. It’s a loose collective of musicians from all around the country and, in some cases, the world. It’s the emerging generation of twenty to thirty-somethings, the sum of the total cream of that crop. They’re really great.”

“This year, there was a long-held ambition to do a concert of octets. With the Mendelssohn Octet being such a favorite in this cohort and for audiences, too, they’ve built a program around the Mendelssohn and around a relatively new piece by John Novacek which is just a little over a year old, ‘Music for 8.’ That piece is a thriller, and really fun. I got to play one of the very first performances of it last summer. It’s actually very challenging, but this is an all-star group and they’re up to it.

“They’ll also play Shostakovich’s ‘Two Pieces for String Octet,’ Op. 11, which is probably the best early example of Shostakovich finding his voice. It comes from his student days when he was obviously a gifted guy, but you don’t hear his modernist voice so much in those earlier works. But in these two pieces, it really does sound like the sort of modernist Shostakovich that we think of later on.

“Shostakovich was working on ‘Two Pieces’ at the same time that he was producing his First Symphony. And when he finished, he was pretty happy, especially with the second movement. He wrote that he thought that was the best thing he had written to date, and I think he was right.”

There will also be a world premiere of a new string trio by Michael R. Dudley Jr. on the August 12 program only.

“The star trumpet player-composer Michael Dudley has written Nexus a string trio which they’ll premiere at the opening concert of the series. Michael is really gifted. Michael has already won a Grammy, and Michael’s younger than them, actually. Michael’s having a big, quick rise. But they’re only playing that in Winnetka and then we will record it later in the week. But it will be the world premiere of the piece.”

September will feature three Guarneri Hall programs devoted to Prokofiev piano works on September 15, 22 and 29.

“We’ll present the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, a rarely encountered set. Adam Neiman will play the whole cycle. He’s brilliant. I know it will be fabulous.

“We felt such a cycle warranted contextualization. Prokofiev isn’t that well understood. He’s a genius who doesn’t quite get enough love, who also has strong Chicago connections. But more importantly, there’s a connection that we can draw between Prokofiev and Russian avant-garde literature, and especially, Russian visual art.

“We’ll have three experts across the spectrum that will each night give a talk contextualizing Prokofiev’s output against the Russian avant garde. Of course, politics comes in with the Soviet impact on art when the avant garde became a total no-no.

“Prokofiev himself was lured from the West back to the Soviet Union with all kinds of promises. But then he had to really knuckle under and was very much repressed by the censors and felt the brunt of that. He trashed a marriage with a wife who didn’t want to move back to the Soviet Union, and really suffered. He died the same day Stalin died, so his death went completely unnoticed.”

Stéphane Wrembell/Photo: Lawrence Sumulong

Guitarist Stéphane Wrembel will be featured in a Guarneri Hall jazz program on September 24-25.

“He’s a superstar of the quintet hot-club style and a Django Reinhardt guy, probably the most admired and well-known of them. I think people will go bonkers to hear Stéphane play solo in a small space like this. He’s a pretty big star. His stuff gets used in a lot of movies, and things like that.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago composer Shulamit Ran—a former composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and professor emeritus of composition at the University of Chicago—will be featured in a program built around her “Moon Songs” October 26-27.

“Shulamit, who’s an old friend, basically called and asked if we could set up a recording of the piece, which we will do. It’s really a masterpiece. We think it’s an unsung gem of hers. It takes a really strong flute player and we have one in Sasha Ishov, making his Guarneri Hall debut. Kristina Bachrach will sing it. She sang it at Marlboro years ago and she’s a favorite of ours and a favorite of Shulamit’s, so that is perfect.

“We’ve placed Shulamit’s ‘Moon Songs’ alongside ‘Water Sprites’ from ‘Pastorale and Caprice’ by Amy Beach and ‘Voices of the Rainforest’ by Elisendra Fabregas. So it happens to be an all-woman composer concert with an emphasis on Earth and Moon.”

Composer Shulamit Ran

“Revolutions” will consist of a pair of concerts with two different programs November 11 and 12.

“The first is devoted to the period of the French Revolution more than anything else, so this is circa 1795. What we’ve done is tied the notion of political revolution to the revolution that happens during that time to the violin bow. I’ll give the talk on the violin bow because that’s an area of expertise for me. It’s the chicken and egg question. Is it the bow that makes Beethoven possible, or does Beethoven make the bow necessary? For this program, we’ll have a Mozart sonata, a Haydn trio and then Beethoven’s Op. 1, No. 3 C minor trio.

“What’s interesting is to hear Op. 1, No. 3—a piece that Haydn recommended Beethoven not publish as he felt it was too out there—and then hear what Haydn was still writing even after that against the Beethoven. You can kind of get a sense of how revolutionary Beethoven really was. We’re so accustomed to him now; we’re so inured to what a dramatic shift he represented that it’s hard to recreate the shock value he must have produced.

“The second evening has to do with music changes around 1918, the Russian revolution and World War I. The program will include Ravel’s ‘Duo’ [Sonata for Violin and Cello], Stravinsky’s ‘L’Historie du Soldat’ in the trio format and Janácek’s First Quartet, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata.’”

Schubert’s “Winterreise” kicks off the New Year on January 6, 2027. “What better to do on a January night in Chicago right at the depth of winterreise [‘winter’s journey’]? It’s such a bleak moment of expression. It’s also interesting to have Chrystal E. Williams in to do it. The power and depth of her voice will make it a pretty unique reading of the piece.”

“Syncopated America” will be a musical cakewalk through the Ragtime era on February 9-10.

Pianist/composer John Novacek

“John Novacek, who wrote the octet that will get played by Nexus for August’s season opener, is coming to play some of his own rags and some traditional rags. John and I are old friends. We play together every summer in Colorado. I’ve seen him give a version of this history of ragtime that he does. It’s scintillating, brilliant and tremendous fun. Ragtime is a true American product. It’s real American music, and is the forerunner of what becomes jazz. When John writes his own rags, they are brilliant and they get played all over.”

Music of French composer and organist Olivier Messiaen will be featured in a program called “For the Birds” March 29-30 that will be introduced by John Bates, curator of birds and section head of Life Sciences at the Field Museum.

“I remember getting gobsmacked by Messiaen thirty-five years ago because I had played ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ a bunch of times and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting representation of bird calls.’ Then I heard someone give a presentation on his ‘Catalogue d’oiseaux’ [“Catalog of Birds”] and suddenly realized he’s not merely representing bird calls, he’s recreating them. We’ll be doing both works.

“Messiaen is such a fascinating character. As long as you have musicians who can suspend the energy, because it’s a lot of suspended energy, and these musicians we’re bringing in have what it takes to do that. If performers are struggling, or there’s things that distract from that, the suspension of disbelief is broken, so we need people who can hold that gossamer scrim of the music up. Then it’s glistening and spectacular.”

Guarneri Hall’s unique season finale “Sound Lab” will take place May 4-5, 2027.

“This has been literally nine years in the making, since our start. The difficulty has been scheduling a time when Carl Giegold and Marcus Mayell of Threshold Acoustics could give us their time to explain what they’ve done in building Guarneri Hall. They’re the acousticians who designed it. They just are really busy with major concert hall projects all over the world, so committing to any time is hard, even though the spirit is always there. We finally, however, got the commitment out of them, and we’ve made a program that we think shows off the range of the space in a way that will give them a lot to talk about.

“We’re going to experiment a little bit with this program to see if we can make some modifications within the room during the event to demonstrate what certain aspects of the room are doing to create particular effects.

“The way Guarneri Hall looks is deliberately non-technical. It looks kind of polished, like a modernist structure on the inside. So you wouldn’t necessarily know that actually everything that you see, all of the elements are very specific to create an acoustic effect. Literally, everything you see—the things that look decorative—nothing is decorative.

“When you see, for instance, unvarnished walnut in these differentiated somewhat randomized widths on the back wall, they are randomized, but in a very specific way to not animate conflicting frequencies.

“And then on the back wall, there’s these unvarnished walnut chevrons. I was in the room when we put those up and it was unbelievable how much more depth they gave the room.

“So to the extent we can do it, we may try to show some of that to the audience so that they can kind of see what wizards like these acousticians are doing when they design a room like Guarneri Hall.”

Nexus Chamber Music Festival at Winnetka Congregational Church, 725 Pine Street, Winnetka, August 12, 6:30pm; and at Guarneri Hall, 11 East Adams, August 13-14, 6:30pm.