Join us for the 2022 Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival!
August 4 – 20, 2022
The 25th season of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival kicks off with the boundary-defying string and vocal trio Time for Three. Their first stop is Lopez Island on Thursday, August 4th, for an afternoon concert at Lopez Center. The trio, Nick Kendall, Charles Yang, and Ranaan Meyer, then performs an early evening outdoor concert on Friday the 5th at the Stage on the Village Green in the center of Eastsound, the busy hub of Orcas Island. Patrons who attended our 2016 Festival were wowed and thoroughly entertained by Time for Three, and this season the trio will is joined by the string duo Sempre Sisters, Olivia and Charlotte Marckx, who first met and played with Time for Three as young teens. The dynamic Marckx sisters also charmed our audiences at the 2019 Festival.
Founder and Artistic Director Aloysia Friedmann has programmed this 25th Season of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival with nods to the past and an eye toward the future. Up-and-coming musicians will share the Orcas Center stage with Festival alumni, including cellist Desmond Hoebig, who performed at our first Festival in 1998!
August 14th brings a second outdoor concert to the Stage on the Village Green, a grand Sunday afternoon event featuring pianist Jon Kimura Parker and trumpeter Jens Lindemann with a full brass orchestra performing a big-band arrangement of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and plenty of other jazzy tunes to get the audience up and dancing on the lawn!
The ten Main Stage concerts at Orcas Center include musicians traveling from across the United States and as far away as Portugal. Among them are violinists Robyn Bollinger, Chee-Yun, Sandy Yamamoto, Cecilia Belcher, and Charlotte Marckx; violists Aloysia Friedmann and Toby Hoffman; cellists Desmond Hoebig, Richard Belcher, and Olivia Marckx; double bassist Chad Wesselkamper; and pianists Jon Kimura Parker and Christopher Shih. String quartet fans will be happy to know that the world-renowned Miró Quartet joins us for the entire Festival. We will continue to update this page as the artist roster and repertoire information evolve.
The Orcas~trations: French Connection concerts on August 12 and 13 are preceded by a talk with Jon Kimura Parker and guest pianist Dr. Christopher Shih, hosted by Aloysia Friedmann. Dr. Shih has a remarkable dual career as both full-time practicing physician and Van Cliburn award-winning pianist.
For those who are unable to attend the concerts in person, one of each of our five concert pairs on the Orcas Center Main Stage will be livestreamed. Covid protocols mandated at the time of the Festival by our concert venues, artist contracts, and San Juan County will be in place, and we will post those guidelines on our website as we get closer to August.
If you’re traveling from afar, consider booking your lodging and ferry reservation soon – you won’t want to miss this action-packed season of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival!
