Summermusik Offers Sonic Fireworks

Anne Arenstein | 08.08.2026

Summermusik’s annual August festival always gives its audiences the unexpected alongside established concert works.

The festival’s resident ensemble, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, teams up with world-class soloists and local artists to perform a wide-ranging array of music including world premieres, the dynamic sound of the Caribbean cuatro, sly comparisons of vice and virtue,  and a long-awaited concert of Frank Zappa’s orchestral music.

The exciting lineup includes performances at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, Sunday afternoon performances and the ever-popular pub crawls and throughout the city.

“The season continues our commitment to pairing world class artists with outstanding community musicians.to showcase America’s cultural diversity,” says Eckart Preu, Summermusik’s music director. “We have outstanding musicians in our orchestra who play music that’s three hundred years old or having a world premiere.”

“The Soundtrack of America” opens the season Saturday, August 8, with music celebrating the country’s natural and cultural resources, beginning with a tribute to First Nations people.

Darren Thompson, an Ojibwe flute player, performs “Cities” from Oregon Suite by Native American composer Franklin Pilard in an arrangement for orchestra commissioned by Summermusik. Thompson, a traditional quill artist and multi-media journalist, grew up in the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

Ocean of Quiet by Canadian composer Simon Rivet is this year’s winner of Summermusik’s Kreitler Commission Competition. Eckart Preu describes the piece as a meditation on the interconnection between all life forms. “It’s an impressionistic soundscape,” he says. “He uses specific instrumentation to produce what I call a heavenly effect.”

Grammy Award winning cellist Zuilly Bailey joins the orchestra for the world premiere of Visions of Humanity and Unity, a five-movement multi-composer cello concerto commissioned by an orchestral consortium (including Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra) for America’s 250th anniversary featuring movements by Mark O’Connor, Avner Dorfman, Enrico Chapela, Zhou Tan and Chanda Dancy.

The Indian American Experience by Cincinnati-based musician and composer Kanniks Kannikeswaran completes the world premiere trilogy, with Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval as narrator.

The celebration concludes with Aaron Copland’s beloved Appalachian Spring.

The following Sunday afternoon, Bailey and Thompson are joined by a vocal quartet and members of the CCO at St. Agnes Church in Ft. Wright, Kentucky, for a program honoring veterans.

Music from Puerto Rico, “The Island of Enchantment,” takes over for the second weekend, featuring cuatro virtuoso Fabiola Méndez, who counts global superstar Bad Bunny among her many fans.

The cuatro is a traditional family of Latin American string instruments whose name means “four” in Spanish, but the Puerto Rican cuatro has 10 strings in 5 pairs.  Méndez joins the CCO for a performance of Ernesto Cordero’s Concierto Criollo for Cuatro, a ‘Cincinnati premiere. Grammy-nominated composer Roberto Sierra’s Symphony No. 3, La Salsa portrays Puerto Rico’s vibrant musical history.  Works by two exciting emerging composers Luis Quintana’s otherworldly On the Ethereal Nature of Bioluminescence and Angélica Negron’s atmospheric Campos Flotantes add to the enchantment.

The party continues Sunday with a Puerto Rican hangout (Juangeo Boricua) at the Delhi Event Center with a pre-concert fiesta sponsored by the Hispanic Chamber Cincinnati USA.

Fabiola Méndez and a CCO string quartet will perform, joined by Son del Caribe, a local ensemble who will sing traditional Puerto Rican folksongs.

The seven deadly sins are well known commodities and Summermusik offers a rare opportunity to hear them as imagined by a team of artistic giants, composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Their “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins features Cincinnati’s Victoria Okafor and Cincinnati Ballet’s Simone Muhammad in a performance devised by Eckart Preu and choreographed by Joshua Stayton.

“I love this piece but it’s short, so that gave us the chance to explore other music that are expressions of those deadly sins,” Preu says. “Pride in Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, envy in Gesauldo’s eerie song “Only Death Can Kill” and lust in  Strauss’s “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

The virtuous counterparts are highlighted on Sunday at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Kenwood. Victoria Okafor, CCO musicians and members of Sycamore High School choirs perform contemporary and classical works.

The festival’s finale “Renegades” gives a nod to Mozart with his Haffner Symphony, but the evening belongs to modern master, composer, iconoclast, social critic, filmmaker and equal opportunity offender Frank Zappa.

In 2012, concert:nova devoted a sold-out two-hour retrospective of Zappa’s music and Eckart Preu has wanted to fill the void for several years. Zappa died in 1993 and his widow Gail was notoriously difficult to deal with until her death in 2015.

“He was so serious about his work, and he knew exactly the sounds and tonalities he wanted, which is why you hear weird combinations like a mandolin with a glockenspiel,” Eckart says. “There’s also improvisation expected from solo instruments like the electric guitar, so how to achieve that balance is always challenging.”

A self-taught musician, Zappa started out as a drummer in R&B bands then switched to guitar. After reading a description of composer Edgard Varèse’s “Ionisations” (“a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds”), Zappa began a lifelong obsession with Varèse’s music, along with that of Anton Webern and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Zappa viewed composition in architectural terms, along the lines of a balancing act. Like his compositional mentor Edgard Varèse, he used “a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases,” he once wrote, comparing his music to “a Calder mobile, a multicolored whatchamacallit dangling in space that has a lot of big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end.”

His work has been recorded by Pierre Boulez, the London Symphony Orchestra (led by Kent Nagano) and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. Although Zappa’s music is beyond category, it’s highly accessible and wildly inventive, with Zappa’s trademark irony and blistering humor never far below the surface.  The program includes “Peaches en Regalia”, “Outrage at Valdez”, “Dog Breath Variations/Uncle Meat” concluding with the wildly kinetic “G-Spot Tornado.”

Actor Giles Davies will read from Zappa’s autobiography.

“We’re presenting American music and he’s an important part of that. His music needs to be heard more often,” Preu says. “Our finale is going to be a blast and everyone will have a great time!”

Summermusik, August 4-29. Information: summermusik.org