2020 Colour of Music Festival Returns to Charleston

Black Professional Classical Musicians Festival Honors Octets Quintets, Winds and Brass

The Colour of Music Festival announces the eighth annual Colour of Music Festival (COMF) January 29-February 1, 2020 at three historic Charleston locations showcasing leading black classical artists from France, Britain, Colombia, and the Caribbean. The 2020 winter Chamber Series will feature members of an ‘elite’ Colour of Music Festival Octet and Quintet group of musicians highlighting performances that include Felix Mendelssohn’s Grand Octetand Florence B. Price’s and Johannes Brahms Piano Quintets.

Since 2013 the Colour of Music Festival (COMF) has brought international, national, and regional classically trained black musicians of African descent to share their musical talents, knowledge, and inspiration to Charleston. Since 2018 the Festival has also traveled to leading collegiate venues and performance halls in Washington DC, Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Richmond.

Winter 2020 Colour of Music Festival Highlights

Performances will take place in intimate settings for audiences to experience up close and feel the magic of how classical music originated, i.e., in salon settings.

Featured highlights include one of COMF’s star musicians, clarinetist Robert L. Davis, who served as principle clarinetist for four years and was also noted in a COMF CBS Evening News feature in 2015. Mr. Davis will perform Brahms, and Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Clarinet Quintets. Also débuting is the new all-star Colour of Music Festival Octet, an elite group of eight black string instrumentalists, performing Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major, Op. 20 and Fugues by Mozart and Bach.

Anyango Yarbo-Davenport, violinist, will join her touring colleague pianist Kyle P. Walker to present Florence B. Price’s Piano and String Quintet in A Minor and Johannes Brahms’Piano and String Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 in a grand setting in historic Murray Center Salon in Spoleto Festival USA.

Additional performances will take place at the historic Edmonston-Alston House Museum Salon, 21 East Bay Street and Middleton Place Pavilion, 4300 Ashley River Road (Hwy 61) surrounded by ancient live oak trees in a new state-of-the art facility.

“Coming off a remarkable fall season of Masterwork gems with 88 musicians on stage at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and 60+ musicians at historic Chappelle Auditorium at Allen University, we are thrilled to showcase a more intimate program which we are calling our Charleston winter showcase.” said Lee Pringle, Founder and Artistic Director of the Colour of Music Festival.