Meet the Performers
For three seasons, Nova Linea Musica has done its work in Chicago. This summer, it goes to Europe. From August 29 to September 7, Nova Linea Musica presents four programs in four cities across Germany and Switzerland. What does the old world have to say to the new one, and what does the new one say back?
Publish Date:
August 22, 2026
BRAUNSCHWEIG: FRIENDS NEAR AND FAR
August 29, Louis Spohr Hall, Braunschweig State Theatre The tour opens in Lower Saxony with an afternoon that puts the question plainly. Presented by Braunschweig State Theatre, “Friends from Near and Far” brings musicians of the Staatsorchester Braunschweig together with guests from America, and the program travels from Leipzig to the American countryside and back again.
The afternoon opens with solo violin: the searching Adagio of Bach’s Sonata No. 1, BWV 1001, then Nathan Milstein’s dazzling Paganiniana, then the quiet, prayerful voice of Lera Auerbach’s T’filah, Op. 33. Three centuries of writing for one unaccompanied instrument, and three entirely differentideas of what it is for.
Seven string players then take up two cornerstones of the chamber repertoire, each of them written far from home. Dvořák composed the “American” String Quartet during his years in the United States, homesick and paying close attention. Tchaikovsky wrote the String Sextet “Souvenir de Florence” out of an Italy he could not stop thinking about. Two composers, two elsewheres, both making something new out of the distance.
Performing: Desirée Ruhstrat, Rabia Brooke, and Dobromiła Hańćka, violin; Santiago E. Osorio and Arnold Stieve, viola; Christian Bußmann and Guchao Zhao, cello.
FRANKFURT: MUSIC FROM THE AMERICASSeptember 2, residence of the Consul General of the United States
Four days later the tour arrives at the residence of the Consul General of the United States in Frankfurt, where Rabia Brooke and Claire Huangci perform music from the Americas. There is no stage and no proscenium: an audience close enough to hear the players breathe. This is the one evening where the question runs entirely in the other direction. In a house that represents the United States abroad, the repertoire comes from this side of the Atlantic, and what the room hears is not what Europe has to say to the new world but what the new world sounds like when it speaks for itself.
BERN: CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY AT VILLA MORILLON
September 6, Villa Morillon und Park, Morillonstrasse 45
The tour crosses into Switzerland for an evening at Villa Morillon, a country estate conceived in 1830 by builders who looked back three hundred years to Palladio and the Italian Renaissance for their model, and restored for public cultural use in 2018. It is a fitting room for this program: a building that put old forms to new purposes, housing music that does the same. This is the largest gathering of the tour, and the program sets classic repertoire beside contemporary work, which is the pairing Nova Linea Musica has built three seasons on at home.
Performing: Desirée Ruhstrat and Rabia Brooke, violin; Mathis Rochat, viola; Andreas Fleck, cello; and Claire Huangci, piano, first-prize winner of the 2018 Concours Géza Anda.
DARMSTADT: AN EVENING AT THE ORANGERIE
September 7 at 19:30, Orangerie, Darmstadt The tour closes the following evening in Darmstadt, presented by the Chopin-Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland e.V. Four artists, one program, spanning the Classical, Romantic, and virtuoso repertoire. Claire Huangci anchors the evening, appearing in every work on it. She opens with Rabia Brooke for Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30 No. 2, a work of storm and lyricism that stands among the composer’s most dramatic contributions to the form. She follows alone with two composers close to the society’s heart: Chopin’s Ballade in F minor, Op. 52, and Polonaise in A-flatmajor, Op. 53, alongside a set of Paderewski miniatures. After the interval, horn player Felix Klieser takes up Dukas’s “Villanelle,” then joins Desirée Ruhstrat and Claire Huangci for Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat major, Op. 40, closing the tour in warm, autumnal color.
WHO IS TRAVELING Twelve artists perform across the four programs: violinists Desirée Ruhstrat, Rabia Brooke, and Dobromiła Hańćka, violists Santiago E. Osorio, Arnold Stieve, and Mathis Rochat; cellists Christian Bußmann, Guchao Zhao, and Andreas Fleck; pianist Claire Huangci; and horn player Felix Klieser.
Half of them are meeting Nova Linea Musica for the first time on this tour.
WHY GO
Nova Linea Musica was built on a straightforward premise: that music deserves rooms where it can actually be heard, and artists who are resourced to play it properly. Three seasons in, with more than twenty-five commissioned works and seventy artists engaged, that premise has been tested almost entirely on one side of the Atlantic. This tour tests it on the other. The presenters are established, the audiences have no prior relationship with Nova Linea Musica, and the rooms range from a state theater to a private residence. What travels and what does not is exactly what we intend to find out, because the answer shapes how Nova Linea Musica grows from here.
FOLLOW ALONG
We will be posting dispatches from each city as the tour moves: Braunschweig, Frankfurt, Zurich, Bern, and Darmstadt, in that order. Expect rehearsals, the rooms themselves, and the parts of touring that never make it onto a program. Season 3 opens September 30 at 11 E Adams St, Chicago, three weeks after the last note in Darmstadt. This is how we get there.
Nova Linea Musica resources the creation of new music and closes the distance between composers, performers, and listeners.
