TLI Presents: The Birch Festival—When Voices Meet

Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Lenox/Stockbridge, MA
Sat, May 9, 2026 3:00 pm

Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner, piano
Yevgeny Kutik, violin
Borromeo String Quartet

How do distinct voices — each with its own history, sound, and perspective — learn to coexist, collaborate, and ultimately build something shared? Featuring the Borromeo Quartet, pianist Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, and violinist Yevgeny Kutik, The Birch Festival offers an afternoon of music that celebrates difference not as division, but as the raw material of community.

The Borromeo Quartet will perform Florence Price’s Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint, where familiar tunes speak to a rich musical legacy — handed down, reshaped, and kept alive across generations. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a virtuoso pianist from New Orleans with a Creole mother and a Jewish father helped shape an early American concert voice; his The Banjo brings sparkle and rhythmic bite, blending concert brilliance with vernacular energy.

Also featured is the Massachusetts premiere of a new work by Jonathan Leshnoff for violin and piano, inspired by George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport — an affirmation of religious freedom as an aspiration we are still called to realize. The program culminates with all six musicians joining for Ernest Chausson’s monumental Concerto in D for violin, piano, and string quartet: a metaphor for community and musical conversation itself, as individual voices — sometimes competing — learn to listen, yield, lead, and join.