By Coral Gables Gazette staff

There is a particular kind of musical evening that Coral Gables has been quietly producing since 1985 — intimate, unhurried, and built around the idea that a great performance is more meaningful when the audience understands what they are hearing and why. The Community Arts Program (CAP) Summer Concert Series has been doing exactly that for 41 consecutive years, and this summer it returns with one of its most accomplished rosters in recent memory.

The series opens June 11 and runs every other Thursday through August 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the historic sanctuary of Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, 3010 De Soto Boulevard, across from the Biltmore Hotel.

An intimate room, a lasting idea

Since its founding in 1985, the CAP Summer Concert Series has welcomed more than 70,000 concertgoers to the intimate Spanish-revival sanctuary that gives the series much of its character. The room holds the music differently than a concert hall — closer, warmer, without the distance that formal venues impose between performer and audience. Each evening includes not just the performance but a conversation with the artist about the music and the journey behind it, a feature that has defined the series from its earliest years.

The 2026 roster spans jazz, classical guitar, piano, and vibraphone across six evenings, with free master classes and jam sessions offered the Friday morning following four of the six concerts.

Six nights, six distinct voices

The series opens June 11 with Empire Wild, a genre-crossing ensemble built around two Juilliard-trained cellists, Mitchell Lyon and Ken Kubota, whose programs move between Bach, Gershwin, the Beatles, and beyond. The Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition named them Ambassador Prize winners.

June 25 brings saxophonist Langston Hughes II with a rhythm section — William Hill III on piano, Eytan Schillinger-Hyman on bass, and Beckett Miles on drums — for an evening of traditional jazz. All About Jazz has noted his emotion-evoking sound and style.

Vibraphonist Warren Wolf performs July 9 with Kris Funn on bass and McClenty Hunter on drums in a program of Americana jazz standards marking America’s 250th anniversary. All About Jazz has described his playing as precise and evocative.

July 23 features guitarist Leonela Alejandro, grand-prize winner of the 2024 Guitar Foundation of America International Concert Artist Competition. Guitarist René Izquierdo has called her bold and unique as both a musician and a performer.

The August 6 concert features Clayton Stephenson, one of the most decorated young pianists in America. The first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022, he was hailed for his extraordinary narrative and poetic gifts and interpretations that are fresh, incisive and characterfully alive. He subsequently received a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant, among the most significant honors in American classical music. Gramophone called him not just a remarkable virtuoso but a poet, a dramatist, and a master storyteller.

The series closes August 20 with Kate Kortum, winner of the 2025 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition — known in the jazz world as the Sassy Awards. Kortum is a breakout jazz vocalist from Houston, whose repertoire moves between bebop, blues, the Great American Songbook, and musical theatre. A graduate of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and the Juilliard School, she has appeared at Birdland, Blue Note, and Dizzy’s, collaborating with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Her debut album Good Woman surpassed 3.5 million streams; her sophomore release Wild Woman followed in 2025.

The music continues the next morning

Free master classes and jam sessions follow the concerts of Langston Hughes II, Warren Wolf, Leonela Alejandro, and Clayton Stephenson, held the Friday morning after each performance from 10 a.m. to noon in the same sanctuary. All are welcome.

For more than four decades, the series has offered Coral Gables something increasingly rare: sustained listening in a city often moving too quickly to pause for it.

“We are very excited to again welcome concertgoers with the usual line-up of incredible artists this summer,” said Mark Hart, executive and artistic director of the Community Arts Program (CAP). “It’s an honor also to welcome concertgoers locally, from across the States, and the globe; and a greatest reward to see students flourish within the CAP after-school music education program, designed to deeply serve all children and youth.”

The CAP Summer Concert Series runs June 11 through August 20 at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, 3010 De Soto Boulevard. Tickets and packages at CommunityArtsProgram.org or by calling 305-448-7421, ext. 120.