By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Ken Kubota treats the cello like something less fixed than tradition suggests: part guitar, part rhythm section, part singing voice. His partner Mitchell Lyon approaches the same question from a different angle, as a teaching artist who spent years with the New York Philharmonic’s community programs trying to persuade students that the instrument could belong to them too.
Together they are Empire Wild, and together they open the Community Arts Program’s 41st Summer Concert Series at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ on Thursday, June 11, at 7:30 p.m.
Two Juilliard cellists, no fixed genre
Lyon and Kubota met as undergraduates at Juilliard. What they built from there is less conventional.
Empire Wild fuses pop, folk, jazz and original composition into programs that move between Bach, Gershwin and the Beatles with the ease of musicians who genuinely inhabit all of it rather than code-switching for effect. The Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition recognized that quality in 2020, naming the ensemble its Ambassador Prize winner.
Their debut EP, Paper Seasons, draws entirely on original material — songs written by the duo that showcase the range of what two cellos can carry when freed from the standard repertoire.
The instrument is the throughline, but not in the way a traditional cello recital uses it. Empire Wild deploys the cello bowed, plucked and chopped, in configurations the instrument’s concert life rarely permits. At times the duo plays against jazz rhythms and pop structures; at others, it circles back to classical material with an ear for what makes it still feel alive.
Kubota has spoken about joy and collaboration as organizing principles: the cello as a vehicle for shared experience rather than demonstration. Lyon, whose work with the New York Philharmonic took him into neighborhoods and schools across New York City, brings a complementary instinct: the belief that music opens differently when the audience is genuinely in the room with it, not just observing from a distance.
That instinct finds a natural home in the Community Arts Program setting. The Spanish-revival sanctuary of Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, directly across from the Biltmore Hotel, is the kind of room that changes a performance. Stone, wood and stained glass give the room an intimacy that purpose-built concert halls rarely match: closer, warmer and less separated from the performers.
Community Arts Program Executive and Artistic Director Mark Hart has built the series around exactly this dynamic. Each concert includes not just performance but conversation, with artists talking about the music and the journey behind it in a way that rewards first-time concertgoers and long-standing regulars alike.
A concert built for participation
Empire Wild’s programs are, by design, unpredictable. The duo frames its concerts as intimate, high-energy and audience-facing. In performance, that promise is less slogan than operating method.
They ask audiences to be participants. There are moments when the crowd becomes the percussion section. There are arrangements of Beatles songs that make the cello sound as if it was always the right instrument for them, and there are original compositions that sit in no particular genre and are more interesting for it.
For a series that has run 41 consecutive years on the proposition that music is more meaningful when listeners understand what they are hearing, Empire Wild is a fitting way to open.
A summer of six concerts
Empire Wild launches a series that runs every other Thursday through Aug. 20, featuring five more artists across jazz, classical guitar and piano: saxophonist Langston Hughes II, vibraphonist Warren Wolf, guitarist Leonela Alejandro, pianist Clayton Stephenson — the first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition — and series closer Kate Kortum, winner of the 2025 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.
Free master classes follow four of the six concerts on Friday mornings from 10 a.m. to noon in the same sanctuary, open to all.
Community Arts Program 2026 Summer Concert Series: Empire Wild. Thursday, June 11, 7:30 p.m. Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, 3010 De Soto Blvd., Coral Gables. General admission is $35 in advance and $40 at the door. Patron tickets are $50 in advance. Series packages are available. Tickets: 305-448-7421 ext. 120 or CommunityArtsProgram.org.
