Admission Cost: $5 USC students; $25 general admission

Hailed by The New York Times as “prodigiously accomplished and exciting,” Blair McMillen takes the stage with a dynamic program featuring the music of Claude Debussy, Brian Wilson, Margaret Bonds, William Bolcom and more.

About the Artist

Hailed by The New York Times as “prodigiously accomplished and exciting” and as one of the piano’s “brilliant stars,” pianist Blair McMillen has forged a musical life that is unbounded by convention. He is well-known for his advocacy of living composers and contemporary music, as well as for championing very early keyboard music and more recent neglected masterpieces. For more than two decades, McMillen has divided his time as piano soloist, chamber musician, music festival director, and educator/teacher.

Blair McMillen is the co-founder and co-director of the Rite of Summer Music Festival. Rite of Summer is a free, outdoor contemporary-music series held on New York City’s Governors Island. The festival has presented boundary-pushing artists such as the JACK Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Tigue, Theo Bleckmann, Todd Reynolds, Contemporaneous, and Don Byron’s New Gospel Quintet. Celebrating its twelfth season in 2023, Rite of Summer is the only annual music festival on Governors Island, a place the New Yorker has called “an enormous playground for the arts.”

Blair McMillen holds degrees from Oberlin College, Manhattan School of Music, and The Juilliard School.

Blair McMillen has performed in major concert venues in New York, throughout the United States, and around the world. 

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 students; $25 general admission

2026 Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music attendees will have a second opportunity to hear pianist Soyeon Kate Lee, praised by The New York Times for her “huge, richly varied sound, lively imagination and firm sense of style.” 

About the Artist

First prize winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Concert Artist Guild International Competition, Korean-American pianist Soyeon Kate Lee has been lauded by The New York Times as a pianist with “a huge, richly varied sound, a lively imagination and a firm sense of style,” and by The Washington Post for her “stunning command of the keyboard.”

Highlights of recent seasons include appearances at the National Gallery, Library of Congress, Gina Bachauer Concerts, Purdue Convocations, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on tour, San Francisco Performances, Camerata Pacifica tour, Chamber Music Chicago and the Cleveland Art Museum. She was a member of Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s Bowers program, and is a regular participant in numerous chamber music festivals including the Great Lakes, Santa Fe and Music Mountain Chamber Music Festivals. Ms. Lee has collaborated with conductors Carlos Miguel Prieto, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jahja Ling, and Jorge Mester with the London, San Diego, Hawaii, Louisiana, Naples symphony orchestras among others.

She has commissioned works by prominent composers and has given world premieres of works written by Frederic Rzewski, Paola Prestini, Marc-André Hamelin, Alexander Goehr, Gabriela Lena Frank, Texu Kim and Huang Ruo.

As a Naxos recording artist, her discography spans a wide range of repertoire from two volumes of Scarlatti Sonatas, Liszt Opera Transcriptions, two volumes of Scriabin, and Clementi Sonatas. Ms. Lee’s recording of Re!nvented under the E1/Entertainment One (formerly Koch Classics) label garnered her a feature review in Gramophone Magazine and the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 USC Students; $25 General Admission

Festival participants compete for a chance to perform with the South Carolina Philharmonic in a Masterworks concert and more than $10,000 in cash prizes.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Echoes of Identity brings together a rich and varied tapestry of violin music by Jewish composers, highlighting both heritage and individuality of expression. Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem stands as a cornerstone of the repertoire, evoking the spiritual depth and intensity of Jewish tradition, while Meira Warshauer’s Yiddish Fantasy offers a vibrant and personal reflection on cultural memory from a contemporary voice rooted here in Columbia, South Carolina. The program is further enriched by works of Israeli composers Paul Ben-Haim and Shulamit Ran, whose music expands the narrative in strikingly different ways, blending lyricism, modernism, and rhythmic vitality. Together, these works reveal the diversity and expressive breadth of Jewish composers across time and place.

Admission Cost: FREE

Cormac Cannon, conductor
Ryan Gonzales, guest conductor

Three colors weave their way through a diverse program of classic and brand-new music for wind ensemble. The USC Wind Ensemble performs the world premiere of the wind ensemble version of Noir by USC School of Music faculty composer Fang Man. Black and white emerge through the piano keys of Charles Ives’ classic The Alcotts, the imagery of historical newsreels in William Schuman’s first work for band, and two marches by John Philip Sousa. The finale, contemporary American composer Michael Daugherty’s Red Cape Tango, is a musical depiction of a “dance of death,” following Superman’s fight to the death with the villain Doomsday.

Fang Man, Noir  - World Premiere of Wind Ensemble Version
Ives/Elkus, The Alcotts
Sousa, The Black Horse Troop
Sousa, The White Rose
Schuman, Newsreel in Five Shots
Daugherty/Spede, Red Cape Tango

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Student chamber music ensembles of diverse instrumentation (typically including string quartets, piano trios, wind quintets and mixed instrument groups) perform chamber music from Baroque to contemporary.

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Cormac Cannon, conductor
Ryan Gonzales, guest conductor
Philip Bush, piano

The USC Wind Ensemble takes flight! Emerging composer Noah Hudson-Camack’s exhilarating fanfare is contrasted with the haunting rising intervals of David Biedenbender’s Enigma. Adam Schoenberg’s Rise is a haunting an evocative journey, while Frank Ticheli’s new work Over the Moon is a joyous and imaginative trip into space. Faculty pianist Philip Bush takes center stage in Olivier Messiaen’s groundbreaking Oiseaux exotiques, based on bird calls from around the world.

Hudson-Camack, Fanfare and Flight
Biedenbender, Enigma
Schoenberg, Rise
Messiaen, Oiseaux exotiques
Ticheli, Over the Moon 

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE