This summer’s Token Creek Festival, Twilight Etchings, evokes a new coloration.

The festival takes place a little later than usual, beginning on Labor Day weekend rather than ending there, and it represents our final season in the structure and format we’ve followed for the last thirty-three years, the schedule and framework you’ve come to expect from us over all that time, with concerts compressed into a two-week time frame to mark summer’s end,

Token Creek isn’t disappearing, but we’re actively exploring the next phase. The Festival Barn will by no means fall silent: we can’t imagine the space without pairs or groups of musicians assembling to play Mozart or Ellington or Birtwistle or Bach. But we do imagine that, going forward, these will bespread throughout the year—intermittent, occasional happenings that are part of an informal afterglow as we transition to what’s next. And wherever we go from here, Token Creek will always be animated by what’s sustained us from the start: the lively transaction between Music, Players, and Listeners.

And so, in closing out our long-running traditional festival, our 2022 seasons brings together many strands that have marked the festival from its start — a brilliant piano concerto (Rachmaninoff), a comprehensive solo keyboard collection (Bach Goldberg), along with our long running Haydn trio series, and the completion of the fourteen-segment Art of the Fugue tour.

We’ll also offer first performances of two new works: a song cycle based on recent poems of poet laureate Louise Glück, and new music for string quintet based on the evocative graphic imagination of Nona Hershey, one of our guests for this year’s Festival.

Pianists Robert Levin and Ya’Fei Chuang, stalwarts from the start, will be with us, along with welcome guests and our many cherished colleagues who make up the Token Creek Festival Ensemble.

With you we’ll join in celebrating our mutual explorations of recent years, all of it impossible without you: the essential public whose attention, curiosity, reaction, and persistence has animated and elevated the entire Token Creek experience, where we hope you’ll continute to find an experience—artists, repertoire, spaces—not available anywhere else.

Do join us— again or for the first time, in person or virtually— for another sojourn at the creek.

With warm wishes,

John and Rose Mary Harbison
Artistic Directors