Founded in Salzburg in 2023, DYNAMIKfest brought its first American edition to Chicago this month. Directed by violinist Clarissa Bevilacqua, the festival is built around a residency model. Rather than flying in for a single engagement and leaving the next morning, guest artists spent nearly two weeks embedded in the community, giving masterclasses, leading outreach programs and performing recitals. The festival places a deliberate emphasis on featuring early-career musicians and attracting young audiences.

The residency culminated on a warm Sunday at Symphony Center’s Grainger Ballroom with a concert titled “Links and Bridges.” Four musicians under 30 took the stage: Bevilacqua, violinist Oliver Neubauer, violist Sarah Strohm and cellist Petar Pejčić. The audience, too, skewed noticeably younger than the crowds typically found in downtown classical music halls.

The five-work program opened with Franz Schubert’s early String Trio in B flat major and closed with Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor. In between came Mozart’s Duo in G Major for Violin and Viola, Augusta Read Thomas’s Silent Moon and George Gershwin’s “Lullaby.” The choices seemed designed to reassure established listeners while trusting the players’ energy to win over everyone else.

I take special pleasure in hearing musicians in their 20s take on composers whose music I have known for years. Familiar scores acquire a different urgency in their hands, as if the players are discovering something in them that the rest of us have learned to take for granted. The musicians seem to be making the case for the music as they play it, rather than assuming its value is already understood. That doesn’t always produce the most polished or settled interpretation, but it can make for a more revealing one. I heard that tension most clearly in the quartet’s performance of Barber.

Before the performance, Bevilacqua described the work as transitional, written by a composer still finding his voice. The familiar second movement, better known in Barber’s orchestral adaptation as Adagio for Strings, already reveals his characteristic lyricism. But to treat the quartet merely as a way station on the road to the Violin Concerto, as Bevilacqua asserted, is to undersell its achievement.

Many ensembles treat the second movement’s rising phrases as an exercise in mournful suspension. Here, the quartet held them in a coiled grip that seemed ready to snap, giving the movement an underlying tension that made dramatic sense against the agitated outer movements. Tightened energy also marked Gershwin’s “Lullaby” and the encore, Kreisler’s Liebesleid (Love’s Sorrow). Both would have benefited from a little more ease. Gershwin needed a softer touch; Kreisler, an unforced Viennese lilt.

A centerpiece of the evening was Thomas’s Silent Moon, performed by Bevilacqua and Pejčić in an arrangement of a score originally conceived for violin and viola. Thomas, who was in attendance, spoke warmly of Bevilacqua’s enterprise, while the violinist described the Chicago composer as an enduring guide. Written two decades ago, the eight-minute work abounds in luminous nocturnal color, drifting between delicate fragments and sudden bursts of motion.

Pejčić anchored the performance with an expansive, earthy cello tone that gave the opening moments of the piece an arresting weight. The earlier Mozart Duo, played by Neubauer and Strohm, and Schubert Trio, in which Pejčić joined them, had seemed slight by comparison. Thomas’s music offered the performers something substantial to dig into. It also provided the evening’s most persuasive link between past and present, echoing Barber’s lyricism while pointing toward a sharper contemporary musical language. If DYNAMIKfest continues in Chicago, it could do worse than introduce more listeners to Thomas’s distinctive local voice, which has received less attention in recent years than it deserves.

Yet the repertoire overall revealed some friction between the festival’s ambitions and its programming. Is Mozart really a draw for younger listeners? And is the gilded decor of Symphony Center the setting most likely to make them feel at home? If DYNAMIKfest returns, it might experiment with venues where younger listeners feel less pressure to conform to classical music’s conventions.

But the burden of change cannot fall on presenters alone. Listeners like me must also become more comfortable with discomfort if classical music is to thrive in the way Bevilacqua envisions. Reaching a new audience may mean asking listeners to encounter unfamiliar music, in unfamiliar places, without the familiar expectations that have long defined a classical concert.

Originally published on Third Coast Review