Welcome from the Artistic Director
Welcome to Muzewest Concerts and to our 2026–27 season. It is my pleasure to present four concerts this year, each chosen for the quality of the artists and the strength of the programs they bring. Whether you have been with us for years or are joining us for the first time, I hope you will find something here worth an evening out.
We open in October with Kanahi Yamashita, a young Japanese guitarist who is the daughter of the legendary Kazuhito Yamashita and an extremely talented musician in her own right. Her program, Hommage à Bach, is dedicated to the Baroque master — his works arranged for guitar, alongside contemporary pieces written in his shadow. The classical guitar is the instrument that rewards such intimacy most of all, and this is a rare chance to hear a remarkable player at the beginning of what promises to be a major career.
In November comes the concert I expect will surprise you most. Nicolas Namoradze, the 2018 Honens winner, returns with Neurorecital, developed with Steinway & Sons, Honens, the University of Calgary and Neuroscape. EEG data recorded from his playing is projected as live visualization during the performance, so you watch the music take shape in the pianist's mind as you hear it. He has chosen Bach, Debussy and Scriabin to bring out the contrasts. There is very little like it on a concert stage anywhere, and we are proud to bring it to Vancouver. It also continues something we intend to keep doing: last season we presented Élisabeth Pion, the 2025 Honens winner, and we will go on bringing the winners of that extraordinary competition to Vancouver audiences.
In March the room changes character entirely. Toronto pianist Jeremy Ledbetter arrives with his seven-piece ensemble CaneFire — Canadian, Cuban and Trinidadian musicians, with steelpan as a lead voice — for a program of Caribbean jazz. Ledbetter spent more than two decades as musical director for calypso legend David Rudder and won a 2023 JUNO as producer of OKAN's Okantomi. Hearing a steelpan at close range, unamplified, is not an experience the concert hall usually offers.
We arrive in May at Beethoven, marking the 200th anniversary of his death, with violinist Jasper Wood, cellist Daniel Hamin Go, pianist Wanting Cheng, and myself. The program spans his whole life. It takes in the First Cello Sonata, Op. 5 No. 1, written by a young man with everything still ahead of him, and rises to two summits: the Archduke, the greatest of his piano trios, and the Grosse Fuge, the most uncompromising music he ever wrote, heard in his own arrangement for piano four hands. Both demand everything of the players. In 2020 the pandemic took from all of us the chance to celebrate his 250th birthday together. Two hundred years after his death, let us not miss this one.
Come to one of these and you will hear something remarkable. Come to all four and you will have travelled a long way without once leaving the Annex.
Tickets are available now. See you at the concerts.
Avan Yu
Artistic and Executive Director, Muzewest Concerts