INNERchamber announces 16th season concert lineup

INNERchamber has announced a lineup of six concerts for its 16th season.

Fans of chamber music and musical explorations of history and popular culture will be happy to learn Stratford’s INNERchamber is returning for its 16th season with a lineup of six unique concerts.

For artistic director and violinist Andrew Chung, having the opportunity to carry the INNERchamber tradition forward after 15 years sharing and performing the music he loves with friends, neighbours and total strangers is a dream come true.

“It feels really great. I’m really grateful at this stage, coming off such a successful 15th season,” Chung said. “We had our best sales and attendance ever. We’re thriving and that just feels wonderful as an arts organization. Our board of directors has been absolutely wonderful; they work hard, they bring a lot of their individual skills and understanding to helping INNERchamber to succeed, and I just think we’ve got a great formula that seems to be resonating with the community.

“For that, I’m super grateful and super excited to launch this season 16.”

While the details for all of this season’s concerts aren’t entirely set in stone yet, Chung said INNERchamber, its musicians and some special guest performers will be embarking on a number of firsts for the organization.

The first concert, Beyond Limits, will take place at Factory163, INNERchamber’s longtime venue and the location for all its concerts this season. For this performance, INNERchamber will present an ambitious program featuring two string quartets: Beethoven’s legendary “Opus 59, No. 1” from his middle period, which is enormous in scope and full of meaning and invention, paired with the great Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s “String Quartet No. 11.”

“With INNERchamber, we use a core ensemble and part of that core ensemble is the string quartet,” Chung said. “String quartet is probably the most intensely rehearsed and prepared music that we do, so we’re really looking forward to digging into this program. Every three years or so, we like to tackle one of Beethoven’s quartets; he composed 17 of them and they’re really seminal pieces, each one, in the genre. So, this ‘Opus 59, No. 1’ … is just fantastic. It’s enormous in scope; I think it’s over 40 minutes long, so we’re even preparing for that now in the summer, trying to get some early work done on it. … It brings out all the best of us as string-quartet players.

“ … So, we were thinking what to pair with it … and we thought, ‘You know, let’s do something by a Canadian, by R. Murray Schafer. R. Murray Schafer composed 12 string quartets. They are fantastic and when I listened to this 11th one, I was really taken by it. Just like Beethoven, he’s really stretching the limits of the ensemble and there’s just really creative ways of writing and expressing himself. I think it’s a perfect fit, these two quartets together.”

As always, INNERchamber is bringing in a number of guest artists to complement each performance of the 16th season.

Derek Kwan, known for his roles in both Stratford Festival musicals this season, will join the INNERchamber string quartet for its second concert of the season, From the Salons of Paris, on Nov. 30.

In early 20th century Paris, the tradition of the salon was rich with storytelling, songs and instrumental music, from the macabre to the ridiculous. Kwan, a uniquely gifted singer and actor, will guide the audience through the salons of Paris with Germaine Tailleferre’s “String Quartet,” Francis Poulenc’s “La Dame de Monte Carlo,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale” by Laura Burton and many more.

For the season’s third concert, Christopher Moorehead will be bringing his dual passions for design and typefaces to Typeface: A Concert of Characters on Feb. 1, 2026.

“Christopher Moorehead is a graphic designer specializing in typography and design and data visualization; he’s a really interesting man with an amazing working career,” Chung said. “I was talking to Chris about typefaces and he just gets so animated because there’s all these stories behind how the typefaces developed. A lot of people might call them fonts, but the correct word for the style of the lettering is typeface, and it’s a really deep well. There’s a lot of stories there to explore that follow the trajectory of music.

“There are developments in typeface and there are developments in how you look at print on the page, but it largely follows a similar developmental arc to music across the past 500 years or more. So together with Christopher, we’ll be handpicking some stories to tell and we’re going to be finding some music from the same era and countries of origin that these typeface designers came from.”

In the fourth concert of the season, Chung will join local fiddle legend and longtime friend Dan Stacey to create a new program together called In the Steps of O’Carolan to be performed on March 1, 2026. Turlough O’Carolan, considered by many to be Ireland’s national composer, travelled across the country in the early 18th century with the help of a guide on account of his blindness, composing hundreds of songs and harp pieces along the way.

Stacey has had a lifelong fascination with the work of O’Carolan, and he joins the INNERchamber Ensemble and narrator Cedric Smith to tell the remarkable story of this composer, including his artistic influences and enduring impact on folk music.

The fifth concert of the season, Reverence, will bring a much-needed pause and nod to nature, for all that springtime brings, with a program co-curated by Spy Dénommé-Welch. For this concert on April 12, Dénommé-Welch – a multi-disciplinary composer, librettist, playwright and educator of Algonquin-Anishnaabe descent – will compose new works themed around the environment, a reverence for our planet and the coming of spring.

The season finale, Imagining Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, set for May 24, will see the return of poet, playwright, director and actor Roy Lewis for a program that blends music from this great British composer with an original script of poetry and prose written by Lewis himself.

Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s musical legacy blends a mastery of Viennese forms with the vital currents of North American Black music at the turn of the 20th century. Using an inimitable blend of fact and fiction, prose and poetry, Lewis presents the life of Coleridge-Taylor and the events that helped shape one of Britain’s brightest musical talents.

While each of this season’s concert will be performed live at Factory163 alongside delicious meals, INNERchamber will continue to make two live concerts accessible through video on demand (VOD), recorded by Mike Fisher of Stream Studio. In the Steps of O’Carolan and Imagining Samuel Coleridge-Taylor will be the two concerts available on VOD on the Wednesday after each live event.

Season pass subscriptions and single tickets are now on sale at www.innerchamber.ca.