PORT TOWNSEND — The Olympic Music Festival will present two concerts this weekend, the first week of its OMF Fellowship series at Fort Worden.
Doors will open at 1:30 p.m. for the two concerts at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Wheeler Theater, 200 Battery Way.
Tickets and information are available at www. olympicmusicfestival.org and Brown Paper Tickets at tinyurl.com/PDN-OMF. Children ages 7 through 12 are admitted free.
Tickets for high school and university students with ID are $20 and $25; other adult tickets are $33 and $40.
This is the fourth year of the Olympic Chamber Music Fellowship, OMF’s cornerstone educational program.
According to a news release, the fellowship is made up of five young artists who are selected following a highly competitive international audition process.
Fellows gain professional experience from performing with mentoring artists, as well as from group discussions and one-on-one lessons.
This year’s fellows include graduates of the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, Yale School of Music and New England Conservatory. Each week culminates in two public concerts that showcase the musicians.
Saturday’s concert will open with music from Eastern Europe. From Kodály’s Hungarian-influenced Serenade to Shostakovich’s orchestral Piano Quintet, it will feature music from the Eastern Bloc that influenced composers for generations to come.
Sunday’s concert, is titled “Vocal Aspirations” for the music of Schubert, Brahms and Dvorák, who wrote extensively for the voice throughout their careers.
These works draw upon these composers’ fascination with melodic invention and how the human voice can be recreated by string and keyboard instruments.
In addition, Brahms wrote his first piano trio as a young man but revised the work at the end of his career transforming a composition that was often neglected into one of the most-performed pieces of chamber music.
Artists will include Jinjoo Cho, violin; Eunae Koh, violin; Ayane Kozasa, viola; Sung Jin Lee, viola; Matthew Zalkind, cello; Julio Elizalde, piano; Merz Trio Brigid Coleridge, violin; Julia Yang, cello; Lee Dionne, piano and others.
The performers will be available after the concerts for question-and-answer sessions.