The Gaon Soloists don’t begin with repertoire. They begin with a question: what happens when young musicians from very different paths — different traditions, different tempos, different ways of hearing the world — decide to make something together?

This special season-opening concert is FREE and open to the public, generously sponsored by Moravian University Arts & Lectures. No ticket is required; for CMLV subscribers, it is a complimentary bonus performance added to the six-concert season.

Marlboro isn’t quite a festival. It’s closer to a laboratory — where artists step away from the spotlight and into something shared. An entire summer of listening. To one another. To the music. To what emerges when you stop performing and start discovering.

What comes out of that carries a different kind of energy. You can hear it in the risk. In the responsiveness. In the sense that the music is still finding its way, even as you listen.

An accordion and a string trio walk into a concert hall.

No, really.

Stravinsky pushes forward. Ravel takes his time. Piazzolla’s Four Seasons starts somewhere familiar — then tilts just enough to make you wonder if you’ve been hearing it wrong all along.

Chamber music has always done this. Put unlikely sounds together and see what happens. Sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes it resets your ears entirely.

Robert Schumann wrote music that feels close. Not distant. Not formal. Close. Even now, it has a way of getting in.

Together they move through piano trio, song, and quartet — music that asks you to listen a little more slowly. You’ll also hear Clara Schumann. Music that stands entirely on its own, and is finally being heard that way.

No single theme holds the program together. Just warmth. Attention. The sense that something is being offered, and received.

You know that one playlist. The one where nothing should go together — and somehow everything does.

Pedja Muzijević doesn’t build programs the usual way. No neat categories. No predictable arcs. Just pieces placed next to each other because something happens when they are. Old next to new. Familiar, then suddenly not. Something you recognize, followed by something you can’t place — but don’t want to skip.

He’s been asking the same question for years: what happens when you trust the sequence?

The work is called Sing for Our Land. It begins with a single instrument. Then something shifts. Movement enters — not to explain the music, not to follow it. Just to meet it. What happens from there isn’t fixed. It listens. It becomes something else.

The Ice House holds it differently than a concert hall would. There’s space for what this needs.

This is a world premiere. No one has experienced it yet — not even the people who made it, not in front of an audience. Two performances. Same work. Different conditions each time.

Some musical relationships take decades to become what they are. The Brentano String Quartet has been doing this work for more than thirty years. You can hear it — in the trust, in the listening, in what happens in the space between notes.

Then Hsin-Yun Huang joins them. Not in front. Inside. Another voice, fully part of the whole.

Mozart wrote the Viola Quintet late in his life. There’s warmth in it, but also clarity — five voices reaching toward something just beyond resolution. It doesn’t rush to conclude.