Caramoor’s longstanding commitment to present a variety of programming that encompasses an expansive range of genres and outstanding artists continues indoors all year round in the Rosen House Concert Series, held in the intimate Music Room of the historic Rosen House. Highlights of the 2025-26 series include the return of boundary-breaking South African cellist Abel Selaocoe (Oct 5); Baroque performance standard-bearers The English Concert led by Harry Bicket (Nov 9); 2025 Grammy-winning Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson (March 22); a benefit concert with singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash (Dec 6); progressive string band The Arcadian Wild (Nov 21); and classical supergroup the Junction Trio (April 12). Added to that are viral singing sensation Stella Cole (Oct 17); Djibouti-born French guitar virtuoso Raphaël Feuillâtre (Oct 26); Grammy-nominated jazz singer Christie Dashiell (Nov 7); German male vocal quintet Amarcord (Dec 7); versatile Irish band Goitse (March 20); multifaceted British cellist Steven Isserlis (April 19); Grammy-nominated jazz clarinetist Anat Cohen’s Quartetinho (May 1); and New York City blues guitarist, vocalist and composer Solomon Hicks (May 8). The fall and spring season is rounded out with two performances by the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition-winning Poiesis Quartet, Caramoor’s 2025–26 Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence (Nov 16 & May 3); and young artists from Caramoor’s Evnin Rising Stars (Nov 1 & 2) and Schwab Vocal Rising Stars (March 8) programs.
Caramoor’s founders, Walter T. and Lucie Bigelow Rosen hosted family and friends for chamber music in the intimate and purpose-built Rosen House Music Room, surrounded by artwork and furnishings of Renaissance and 18th-century Europe. The historic ambiance of the Rosen House provides a unique venue for Caramoor’s performers – many of whom are unlikely to be heard this season elsewhere in the New York area.
Recitals, Chamber Music, and Classical
South African cellist Abel Selaocoe weaves together Western classical traditions with the rich musical heritage of Africa. Equally at home with orchestras, in recital, at clubs, or in music festivals, his high-energy, improvisation-laden cello and vocal performances have been heard in venues around the world. He released his second album, Hymns of Bantu, this past spring, and at Caramoor will perform a program that includes New York premieres of new Caramoor co-commissions by Michel van der Aa, Ben Nobuto, and Selaocoe himself, as well as works by Colin Alexander and Kit Downes and excerpts from Bach cello suites (Oct 3).
The English Concert has been a pioneering force in the period instrument movement since 1973, when it was founded by harpsichordist and conductor Trevor Pinnock. The group’s vast and influential discography established it as a leading voice in the early music revival and helped popularize Baroque music. Harry Bicket became Artistic Director in 2007, and under his leadership, The English Concert has embraced a wide range of repertoire, with a renewed focus on opera and oratorio. The New York Times recently declared: “This ensemble sets a standard for Handel performance in the 21st century,” while The Arts Desk raved that “the orchestra under Bicket’s sensitive flexibility wrought constant wonders.” Their Caramoor performance includes concerti grossi by Handel and Geminiani, a Bach concerto for two violins, and music by Purcell, Dario Castello, and Georg Muffat (Nov 9).
German male vocal quintet Amarcord was founded in 1992 by five former members of the St. Thomas School’s Thomanerchor boys’ choir in Leipzig, which was led by J.S. Bach from 1723–50. Known for their flexibility and seamless blend, as well as for performing music of every type and genre, the group has appeared at international festivals and undertaken tours of Europe, North America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia. They bring a Christmas-themed program to the Rosen House Concert Series (Dec 7).
Winner of the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s recordings have led to over one billion streams, and he has won BBC Music Magazine Album of the Year and twice been awarded Opus Klassik Solo Recording of the Year. His Caramoor recital is an exploration of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E major, Op. 109, which he contextualizes with the same composer’s E minor sonata, Op. 90, and works in both keys by Bach and Schubert (March 22).
Classical supergroup the Junction Trio is made up of violinist Stefan Jackiw (2007 Evnin Rising Star), pianist Conrad Tao, and cellist Jay Campbell. Their Caramoor program includes Tao’s Eventide, along with piano trios by Ravel and Schumann. Under the headline “The Junction Trio brings a little unruliness back to Carnegie Hall,” New York Magazine’s “Vulture” called the group “three stupendous musicians who glory in artistic instability, the sense that styles are not pure or settled practices and never were” (April 12).
British cellist Steven Isserlis – one of only two living cellists featured in Gramophone’s Hall of Fame – enjoys a unique and distinguished career as a soloist, chamber musician, educator, author and broadcaster. His Caramoor recital – with regular collaborator Connie Shih on piano – includes works by Beethoven, Schumann, Fauré, and Nadia Boulanger. These composers represent a cross-section of the cellist’s many specialties: he has curated programs dedicated to the teacher-pupil line of Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Ravel and to varied aspects of Schumann’s life and music; has acted as writer and presenter for a documentary about Schumann’s life; recently gave a performance with Sir András Schiff at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn using Beethoven’s own cello; and has recorded Beethoven’s complete music for cello and piano with Robert Levin, using original or replica fortepianos from the early nineteenth century (April 19).
Jazz
Beginning with an impromptu a cappella clip of “Over the Rainbow,” Stella Cole has become a global viral sensation for simply doing what she has been passionate about her whole life – singing songs from the Great American Songbook. With an audience developed in part by her weekly livestream concerts on TikTok from 2020 to 2022, Cole has a combined social media following of over 1.6 million, her most-watched video now has 27 million views, and she has sold out concerts around the world. She performs a benefit concert at Caramoor titled “Cabaret in the Music Room” on the heels of the release last fall of her self-titled debut album (Oct 17).
Jazz singer Christie Dashiell was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Greenville, North Carolina, in a musical family. Her father, Carroll Dashiell, is a bass player who heads the music department at Howard University, where Christie also studied and now teaches; her brother C.V. Dashiell is her longtime drummer. Her debut solo album, Time All Mine, debuted on Billboard’s Jazz Album and Contemporary Jazz Album Charts at numbers 13 and 22, as well as making JazzTimes’s Top 50 “Writers’ Ballots” Critics’ Poll; her second album, Journey in Black, was a 2025 Grammy nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album (Nov 7).
Anat Cohen’s foursome, Quartetinho (pronounced “quartet-CHIN-yo”), comprises Cohen on various clarinets, Tal Mashiach on bass and guitar, Vitor Gonçalves on piano and accordion, and James Shipp on vibraphone and percussion. Their second album, Bloom, was released in 2024 and showcases compositions by each member of the band, as well as Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle, Tinkle” and an expansive arrangement of Paraguayan guitarist-composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré’s classic “La Catedral.” The ensemble has a deep respect for melody and lyricism, as well as for the various traditions they fearlessly explore, whether jazz, samba, Israeli folk music, or the American songbook (May 1).
Roots
Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammys and twelve additional nominations. She is also an author of four books, including the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” One of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, she was awarded the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. In 2021, Cash was the first female composer to receive the MacDowell Medal, awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. For this benefit performance in the Rosen House Concert Series, she is joined by her husband, guitarist John Leventhal (Dec 6).
Genre-bending trio The Arcadian Wild, a progressive string band from Nashville, released their latest album, Welcome, in 2023. The adventurous album draws on everything from country and classical to pop and choral music. Mandolinist and singer Lincoln Mick comments: “Harmony has been at the center of our musical experience and expression from the very beginning. Often, when we’re unsure of what to do next, we’ll say, ‘Let’s just all sing together.’” Guitarist and singer Isaac Horn adds that despite performing without a drummer, the trio “actually tr[ies] to treat our band like a drum set. Who’s the kick? Who’s the snare? Who’s the crash? Everyone has a specific role that comes together intentionally to form something that should ultimately feel very natural and conversational.” Fiddler Bailey Warren rounds out the roster (Nov 21).
Multi-award-winning Irish quintet Goitse – Gaelic for “come here” and pronounced “Go-wit-cha” – was described by fRoots Magazine as “sprightly instrumentals with exciting and unexpected twists topped off with winsome vocals.” Mixing their own compositions with age-old traditional tunes, the group has released six critically acclaimed recordings and tours year-round throughout Ireland, the UK, Germany, France, and the United States. Goitse features Colm Phelan on bodhrán; Conal O’Kane on guitar; Áine McGeeney on vocals and fiddle; and multi-instrumentalists Alan Reid and Daniel Collins, the former mainly on banjo and bouzouki, and the latter famed for his accordion work. Together, they bring to Caramoor what Irish Music Magazine calls “music that’s brimming with energy and creative zeal” (March 20).
Guitarist, vocalist, and composer Solomon Hicks is a 30-year-old from New York City who started playing when he was a six-year-old growing up in Harlem. He won the 2021 Blues Music Awards for Best Emerging Artist for his 2020 CD release, Harlem, on Provogue Records. He’s shared stages with Buddy Guy, Samantha Fish, Tony Bennett, Jeff Beck, Ringo Starr, Jimmie Vaughan, Beth Hart, Mavis Staples, Robert Cray, Eric Gales, Norman Nardini, and many others, and is a member of the Blues Foundation in Memphis. He has also taught music for the Children’s Aid Society, working with the Harlem Arts Alliance and the New York City Jazzmobile (May 8).
Mentoring
After winning the Grand Prize and Lift Every Voice Prize in the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition just eight months after their formation, the Poiesis Quartet also received the Gold Medal and BIPOC Prize at the 2023 St. Paul String Quartet Competition. The following year, they joined the Concert Artists Guild roster for North American management as winners of the Louis & Susan Meisel Competition, and in 2025 Poiesis was named one of only ten competitors – and the only one from the United States – in the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition. Dedicated to programming music of all styles and genres, with an emphasis on works by emerging and underrepresented composers, their fall program includes Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s “Calvary” Quartet, along with an arrangement by group violinist Max Ball of the spiritual that served as Perkinson’s theme. Also featured are a quartet by Brian Raphael Nabors that Poiesis premiered in 2024; two quartets by Chinese-Canadian composer Kevin Lau, including the Poiesis-commissioned String Quartet No. 7, which they premiere this summer; and Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences. In the spring, Poiesis gives a second performance, with a program comprising Bartók’s Fifth Quartet, Jamaica-born British composer Eleanor Alberga’s Second Quartet, and American composer Michi Wiancko’s To Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores, composed during the height of the pandemic to give inspiration to the youth population applying their energy and talents towards bringing about change (Nov 16; May 3).
Young artists from Caramoor’s Evnin Rising Stars mentoring program perform in a pair of afternoon concerts for which the program’s Artistic Director, cellist Marcy Rosen, is joined by distinguished artist-mentors violinist Ida Kavafian and violist Rebecca Albers. These concerts are the capstone of a week-long residency at Caramoor in which the young musicians participate in workshops, reading sessions, and ensemble rehearsals, culminating in live performances with their mentors. Since 1992, this program has identified some of the finest musicians of the next generation and helped them cross the threshold from their student years into the early stages of a professional career. After an opening performance of chamber music by Boccherini, Ginastera, and Brahms, the second afternoon features works of Mozart and Shostakovich, along with Dvořák’s Sextet. Participants this year are violinists Isabelle Ai Durrenberger, Clara Neubauer, and Cherry Choi Tung Yeung; violists Samuel Rosenthal and Luther Warren; cellists Annie Jacobs-Perkins and Leland Ko; and pianist Evren Ozel (Nov 1 & 2).
Caramoor’s Schwab Vocal Rising Stars – led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, assisted by Bénédicte Jourdois – present To the Sea, a hymn to the lure (and the menace) of the ocean. The program includes works by Elgar, Guastavino, Rachmaninoff, Pauline Viardot, and Debussy. Four promising singers and a pianist are selected yearly for the week-long Schwab Vocal Rising Stars residency, which includes daily coaching, rehearsals, and workshops, culminating in a concert in the Music Room. Developed in conjunction with the New York Festival of Song, the program focuses on art song interpretation and has a lasting impact on the growth, development, and professional practices of young artists (March 8).