Since making a splash at the Inaugural 2023 Global Music Education International Competition in Beijing (and winning the $100,000 Grand Prize), violinist Joshua Brown has captured the hearts of listeners through his passionate and virtuosic playing. Josh and Victor open our season with the monumental Franck Sonata, followed by a display of jaw-dropping technique in works by Kreisler and Paganini.

American Recital Debut Award winner John-Henry Crawford and the Vega String Quartet present an afternoon of masterworks by the great composer, giving us a first-hand perspective of what intimate gatherings amongst Schubert’s friends must have been like during his time. The two epic works featured this afternoon are the Death and the Maiden Quartet, and the Cello Quintet, preceded by J. S. Bach’s iconic First Cello Suite.

Fresh from his episode on PBS’s Now Hear This with Scott Yoo, the incredible storyteller Alex Hersh, and Steinway Artist Víctor Santiago Asunción return to the Memphis Chamber Music Society with a dazzling program featuring Opus One sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven and Saint-Saëns, and Grieg’s lone sonata in A minor.

It must have been love at first sight for Clara and Johannes from the moment she ushered him into their musical home when the latter came over to introduce himself to her husband Robert, who was away at the time. Imagine all the works that wouldn’t have been composed had they not met! Clara influenced these two men to write her into their works, subsequently inviting us, the listeners, into their private thoughts and emotions. Brahms’s great piano trio in B Major, and Schumann’s turbulent D minor trio, sandwich the often overlooked piano trio by Clara. Performers are Marcin Arendt, Kimberly Patterson, and Adrienne Claire Park.

Long before Richard Strauss wrote his epic tone poems, he composed a very young but no less heroic sonata for violin and piano in E-flat, the very key used by Beethoven in his Eroica Symphony. He initially dedicated that symphony to Napoleon until the latter showed his true dictatorial colors. Our hero, Basil Alter, crosses the pond to give us an account of this magnificent work with pianist Evan Solomon, as well as other gems of the violin and piano repertoire.

The piano quartet repertoire is one of the most unsung in chamber music literature, but these works are no less stunning to perform or hear. Kevin Zhu, violin, Matthew Lipman, viola, and Gabriel Martins, cello, join pianist Víctor Asunción and close the season for the Memphis Chamber Music Society with great piano quartets by Mendelssohn, Brahms, and America’s own Arthur Foote.