Virtuoso violinist, Juilliard instrument curator, and Hoboken, N.J. resident Eric Grossman will be joined by family members Lida Lopez Mancheva (piano) and Cecilia Grossman (cello) for this survey of famous composers of the Baroque period, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and their contemporaries.

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. All aspects of hip-hop culture are being celebrated in the community and around the world. While many tributes are male-dominated, this performance celebrates the contributions of women in hip hop.

"Let’s make the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop a time to engage. Look to the future, support, effect change." —Ice T

Jim Campilongo is a New York roots rock guitarist, known for the sound of his 1959 Telecaster that he plays with a hybrid right-hand technique that involves the use of both a plectrum and his fingers, capturing elements of country, bluegrass, blues, and rock and roll.

He writes the popular monthly column Vinyl Treasures for Guitar Player Magazine and has recorded a series of instrumental albums with his trio and is a member of The Little Willies band with pianist and vocalist Norah Jones.

For this intimate performance he will be joined by Luca Benedetti (guitar), Andy Hess (bass) and Dan Rieser (drums). 

Highlife was a style of urban recreational dance popular in West Africa in the 1950s. It originated in James Barnor’s Ghana, where musicians adopted Western dance-band instruments at open-air nightclubs to celebrate the exuberant spirit of independence. Join the DIA’s High Life Dance Party with the Adom High Life Band and learn its graceful and expressive moves with instructor Sasu Amen Ra. 

Presented alongside the exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London—A Retrospective.

Image: James Barnor (Ghana, b. 1929). Tempos Band, birthday celebrations, Adabraka neighborhood, Accra, 1958 (printed 2010–20). Gelatin silver print. Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

© James Barnor, courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

In 2023, the DIA will host Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival with performances by the Pelia and Hesper String Quartets with a program of works by Robert Schumann and Dmitri Shostakovich:

• SCHUMANN String Quartet No. 3 in A major, Op. 41, No. 3
• SHOSTAKOVICH Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11
• SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat minor, Op. 144

The Pelia String Quartet was formed at the Emerson String Quartet Institute of Stony Brook University in 2019. The quartet received a special prize at the 2022 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, a bronze medal at the 2022 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and were winners of the 2022 Ackerman Chamber Music Competition. The Pelia Quartet served as the resident string quartet for the SUNY Artist Residency in 2020-2021. 

The Hesper String Quartet is a Korean-American chamber ensemble that was formed as a student group at Stony Brook University in 2022. Since its formation, the quartet maintains an energetic balance of performing works by Beethoven, Schumann, and Haydn, while performing works by living composers such as Joan Tower. 

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival began in 1992 as a joint effort between Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings and local religious institutions. Since then, the organization has brought some of the world’s most acclaimed chamber musicians to the city for a two-week Festival that occurs in venues across the metropolitan area. 

Each year Mr. B stages his annual Blues and Boogie Piano Celebration in Ann Arbor, and in 2023 the DIA is hosting an additional evening of Boogie Woogie piano featuring Mr. B and pianists Carl ‘Sonny’ Leyland and Luca Fliastro.

Boogie Woogie is a profound, expressive and powerful style of piano playing, firmly rooted in the blues and played here by two of the masters of the style. 

Phyllis Chen presents a new program for piano, toy pianos, and projections. Opening the program is Tone Grove, a piece for manipulated music boxes. The main piece is based on an original scroll painting by Newbery- and Caldecott-award winning artist and author Grace Lin. The piece explores the four major Chinese constellations. 

Introspective, multi-layered and quietly majestic, composer Jane Antonia Cornish’s Sierra is a vivid meditation on how our deep connection to nature can move us to an inner stillness and awaken the creative impulse. Sierra consists of five separate pieces composed for multiple pianos, ranging from the poignant solo excursion Last Light to the cascading, undulating ‘Ocean’ and the epic 15-minute title piece.

Pianist Vicky Chow, whose ability to flex in different interpretive directions, depending on the composer’s intention, is renowned in the modern classical community. Sierra captures a palette of subtle but insistent emotions — wonder, wistfulness, joy and awe — that can elevate and transport with astonishing power.

Vân-Ánh Võ’s Blood Moon Orchestra (BMO) is a genre-bending musical collective that defies the bounds of Vietnamese traditional music. All master musicians, members of BMO have an innate ability to blend very different sounds together, creating surprisingly new and fresh musical dialogues.  

Emmy Award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Võ has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma and presented her music frequently at The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. 

This program is made possible by a grant from the Freeman Foundation

French double bass player and composer Florent Ghys performs his new double album "Ritournelles & Mosaïques" in a solo for double bass, electronics, and video.

Florent’s album has been described by French journalist Melanie Bauer (France Inter) as “a massage for the brain” and Alex Ross (The New Yorker) said that his videos “have rightfully attained viral fame.”