By Coral Gables Gazette staff
The Mainly Mozart Festival opens its 2026 season with a program that moves purposefully through three centuries of music for violin and piano — from the luminous economy of Mozart to the Romantic sweep of Grieg, with Kreisler’s old-Vienna wit, Korngold’s theatrical imagination, and Saint-Saëns’s Spanish-flavored dash filling the spaces between.
The concert takes place Friday, May 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the Knight Center for Music Innovation on the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables. Doors open at 7 p.m.
An exceptional pairing
The evening brings together two artists who have performed this repertoire together before and who bring markedly different pedigrees to the stage. Violinist William Hagen is among the most decorated American violinists of his generation. He took Third Prize at the 2015 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels — making him one of the most successful American laureates in the competition’s history — and has since appeared as a soloist with many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Chicago, Frankfurt Radio, and San Francisco symphony orchestras. Critics have praised him as a “brilliant virtuoso” and “a standout,” noting his “glowing tone,” “virtuosic pyrotechnics,” and “poise and maturity.” He performs on a 1732 Stradivarius violin on loan from the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation.
At the piano is Marina Radiushina, artistic director of both the Mainly Mozart Festival and the Miami Chamber Music Society — the organization that has produced the festival for more than two decades. Radiushina, a Ukrainian-American pianist, co-founded the Miami Chamber Music Society and took over the Mainly Mozart series, bringing what she described as an approach intended to create an experience that is “a little bit edgier than usual.” Her leadership has brought world-class musicians to South Florida and created innovative platforms for chamber music, and her artistry as a performer complements her visionary role as a curator.
The architecture of the program
The evening’s design is deliberate. Mozart’s Violin Sonata in A major, K. 305, opens in a world of poise and luminous dialogue — two voices of equal weight, neither leading nor following so much as thinking together. From there, three works by Fritz Kreisler shift the atmosphere toward warmth and nostalgia: the sighing melancholy of Liebesleid, the playful elegance of Caprice Viennois, and his spirited reworking of Mozart’s Haffner Serenade — a piece that circles back to the evening’s starting point while transforming it through Kreisler’s distinctly Viennese sensibility.
Korngold’s suite drawn from his incidental music to Much Ado About Nothing provides the program’s most theatrical turn. Written in 1919, the suite — which includes a garden scene, a masquerade, and the tender Lied der Waldtaube — demonstrates why Korngold’s transition to Hollywood film scoring decades later felt so natural. The music thinks in scenes, not movements.
Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, composed in 1887, forms the emotional anchor of the program. It is among the most demanding works in the violin-piano literature — emotionally direct, harmonically restless, and built for performers willing to commit fully. Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso closes the evening with Spanish color and unambiguous brilliance. It is the kind of piece that invites the audience to simply enjoy the instrument at its most dazzling.
The venue
The Knight Center for Music Innovation is a $36.5 million, 25,000-square-foot performance and technology hub at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, designed by H3, an Arquitectonica company. Its centerpiece is the Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Recital Hall, a 200-seat performance space with superior acoustics whose expansive use of glass and rich wood finishes are designed to create what the acoustic designers described as an “ocean” of sound for soloists, chamber orchestras, and small ensembles. For an intimate recital of this kind, the hall is an ideal fit — small enough to feel like a private occasion, precise enough to reveal every gradation of color and dynamic.
What to know
The Mainly Mozart Festival is presented by the Miami Chamber Music Society, a nonprofit organization. Now in its 24th season, the festival presents outstanding local and visiting classical artists in concert. Tickets are available through Eventbrite. Paid parking is available; no refunds are offered. The Knight Center for Music Innovation is located at 5513 San Amaro Drive, Coral Gables.
