Friends of Music has announced its 2025-2026 concert season. The season will run from Sept. 27 through May 31, 2026, and include a total of five concerts. Four of the concerts will be performed in Shepherdstown. One will include performances in both Shepherdstown and Charles Town.
The first concert will be a collaboration with the Potomac Valley Audubon Society. Entitled “Beethoven for the Birders,” it will feature two works that incorporate bird songs into a celebration of nature: Respighi’s “Gli Ucelli” (“The Birds”) orchestral suite and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony. There will two performances of this concert, one at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27, and the other at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28. Both performances will be in the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church.
The other concerts will be as follows:
• Two Rivers String Quintet—One performance only at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, in Shepherdstown’s Trinity Episcopal Church. The program, entitled “Double Down: Two Cellos, Twenty Strings,” will include Schubert’s String quintet in C major and a Boccherini’s string quintet in C major entitled “La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid” (“Night music of the streets of Madrid”)
• Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra—7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 29, 2026, in the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church. The program, entitled “Guitar Mania,” will feature guitar virtuoso Junhong Kuang as a guest artist and include works by Vivaldi, Villa-Lobos, and Schubert.
• Music of the Regiment ensemble—7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 18, 2026, in Shepherdstown’s Trinity Episcopal Church, and 3:00 p.m. Sunday, April 19, 2026, in Charles Town’s Happy Retreat. Intended as part of Jefferson County’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the program will feature music from the time of the Revolutionary War.
• Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra—7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 30 and 3 p.m. Sunday, May 31, 2026, in the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church. The program, entitled “Doubles Anyone?”, will feature two violinists, Heather Austin-Stone and Salvatore Amadeo, and include works by Golijov, Bach, and Dvorak.
Admission to all the concerts is free for Friends of Music members. Memberships are $175 per person. Nonmembers may buy tickets for individual concerts; the price is $40 per person for the Chamber Orchestra concerts and $35 per person for the Two Rivers String Quintet concert and the Music of the Regiment concert. Elementary and high school students can attend for free. Tickets for college students are $5 each.
Memberships and tickets can be purchased on the Friends’ website at www.friendswv.org or by mail (FOM, PO Box 220, Shepherdstown, WV 25443). If space is available, tickets for individual concerts will be available at the performances. All major credit cards will be accepted.
Friends of Music is a local non-profit organization founded in 1999 to support and promote musical excellence. It is governed by a board of directors made up of local citizens.
The Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra is the only professional chamber orchestra in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia and one of only three in the state. It was established by the Friends of Music in 2007 and has been sustained by the Friends since its inception. Jed Gaylin has been the orchestra’s music director since 2012. He also serves as the music director of Baltimore’s Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey, and he is the principal guest conductor of the Cape May New Jersey Music Festival.
Friends of Music receives generous support from the WV Department of Arts, Culture and History and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the WV Commission on the Arts; the Nora Roberts Foundation; Ecolab; the Long Meadow Fund; the Mary J. Stanley Charitable Fund; the Marion Park Lewis Foundation for the Arts; the Ian Thom Foundation; Dr. John Gibson, DDS; Heidi Johnston, Keller Williams Realty; Jefferson Security Bank; and City National Bank.
Full information about the Friends and its current concert season is available at www.friendswv.org.
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