Opening Night: Baroque and A Famous Musical Quote - Manchester Music Festival

Start: Thursday, July 10, 2025 7:30PM
End: Thursday, July 10, 2025 9:30PM

Emi Ferguson, Principal Flute of the distinguished Handel & Haydn Society and recipient of the 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant, joins early music specialist Arthur Haas (harpsichord), Philip Setzer (violin) and the MMF Young Artists Strings to open the season with Bach’s lively Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Music inspired by Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton shapes the program in songs from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Oedipus, as well as Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, featuring the internationally acclaimed soprano Sherezade Panthaki, a radiant phenom for whom “it becomes increasingly difficult to find words that will adequately convey the multifold splendor of her singing” (San Francisco Chronicle). Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, which owes its literary inspiration to Goethe’s Faust, while also paying homage to Handel, governs the Arkell Hall stage on the second half of the program.