2024-2025 Season
icarus Quartet: “Bartók Reborn”
Monday, September 30, 2024
7:30 PM
Brendle Recital Hall, Scales Fine Arts Center
A Secrest Series world premiere! “Bartók Reborn” will be presented by the icarus Quartet, an ensemble of two pianists and two percussionists anchored by Wake Forest Music faculty member Larry Weng. Bartók’s “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion” will be followed by three new works commissioned by the Secrest Artists Series – and written in response to Bartók’s masterpiece – by composers Martin Bresnick, Viet Cuong, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon.
Cuarteto Casals
Thursday, November 7, 2024
7:30 PM
Brendle Recital Hall, Scales Fine Arts Center
The Cuarteto Casals from Spain, with its distinctive tonal balance and interpretive brilliance, is one of the finest string quartets in the world. Founded 27 years ago, they have received first prizes at the International String Quartet Competition in London and the International Johannes Brahms Competition in Hamburg. Their concert will feature works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich.
Tonality, vocal ensemble
Monday, January 20, 2025
7:30 PM
Wait Chapel
Founder and Artistic Director Alexander Lloyd Blake (Wake Forest ’10) created Tonality to connect people through song, using choral music to stimulate community conversations about important issues in the contemporary world. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, the 2024 GRAMMY-winning vocal ensemble will present their “America Will Be” program, a renewed vision for an inclusive America.
Vijay Iyer Trio, jazz
Thursday, March 6, 2025
7:30 PM
Brendle Recital Hall, Scales Fine Arts Center
Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer is one of today’s most in-demand jazz musicians, and is a composer, pianist, and professor in the Harvard University music department. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, and a GRAMMY nomination.
About his all-star trio (including Australian bassist Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship-winning percussionist and composer), All About Jazz says, “the visionary musician [Iyer] leads an ensemble that formulates an exquisite redefinition of jazz’s well-established instrumental concept of the piano trio.”
Thomas Dunford, lute
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
7:30 PM
Brendle Recital Hall, Scales Fine Arts Center
Frenchman Thomas Dunford is a rising star of the European early music movement, and a dynamic and charismatic performer of Renaissance, Baroque, and modern music on the lute. BBC Music Magazine has written of him, “Dunford’s supple technique, combined with his passion for jazz, allows him to decorate and elaborate … with improvisatory abandon, shedding new light on old favourites. He really plumbs the depths, too, of Dowland’s melancholy ‘blues’ style, proving himself to be an Eric Clapton of the lute.”