By Armita Mirkarimi, Staff Writer
For nearly twenty years, Sakiko Ohashi and her family had been coming to Vermont every summer. After Hurricane Katrina upended her life in New Orleans — where Ohashi had organized a chamber music festival — the Green Mountain state became one where they went to recover and breathe. “Every summer we’ve been going there as a place to rejuvenate ourselves and heal in some way,” Ohashi told the Standard this week. The idea of starting another festival had quietly lingered all that time, but life, she said, had a way of making it feel impossible. “I just didn’t have any energy, or even the will to do that for a while.”
In the summer of 2022, as her son was taking horseback riding lessons at Delaney Stables in Brownsville, Ohashi’s husband wandered down the hill and found the West Windsor Town Hall with its doors open. He came back and told her he thought he’d found her a concert venue.
“I was like, ‘What, really?’” Ohashi recalled. “I knew how much work it took to put together a festival, and we didn’t even live in Vermont. I didn’t even know this town.”
But the prospect of organizing a festival was hard to resist. For Ohashi, playing chamber music with close friends and colleagues has always been an intimate and rewarding aspect of her performing career. She told the Standard that she had long believed a festival was the purest expression of that — a chance to bring the people she loved most into a room with an audience waiting to be touched by live music.
Sakiko Ohashi, founder and artistic director of the West Windsor Music Festival, which will return this month to the town hall for three evenings of chamber music in an intimate setting. Courtesy of Sakiko Ohashi
This June 26-28, the West Windsor Music Festival returns to that same town hall for its fifth year, bringing three evenings of chamber music to the intimate space that has proven to be a nearly perfect home. Ohashi, the festival’s founder and artistic director, will close out the weekend herself.
A native of Japan, Ohashi came to the piano young. She was four and a half, living in Tokyo, when her older sister’s piano teacher noticed talent in Ohashi and suggested that when the family moved to Osaka, they find her a serious teacher of her own. When they moved, she started classes with a young woman who, Ohashi says, laid the foundations for everything. “She dedicated her life to me as a professionally trained teacher. I still keep in touch with her.”
By ten, she had auditioned into the Juilliard Pre-College Program and later earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School. It was there that she built the friendships that would, decades later, give the West Windsor Music Festival its spirit.
As Ohashi began planning the festival, she had no idea whether anyone would come. “I didn’t even know who was going to show up,” she said. “I was just going to have fun with my friends.” To her surprise, Vermont audiences trickled in that first summer and kept coming.
Helen Kim, a violinist taking the festival stage this year alongside Ohashi, who has performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall to international stages across Europe, said the Vermont setting strips away everything extraneous. “This music was created for this type of audience,” she said. “Small gatherings, intimate surroundings. I think it’s more authentic in a certain sense. I hope when you come away from it, you feel it’s accessible. That it brings you something.”
Kim and Ohashi have known each other since they were 16, when they were placed next door to each other in the under-18 housing at the Aspen Summer Music Festival. When Ohashi later arrived at Juilliard, where Kim was already enrolled, they gravitated toward each other immediately, signing up for the same chamber music class and beginning what would become a decades-long musical partnership.
“We don’t have to discuss, ‘Hey, I’m going to take a little more time here because I feel this music section a certain way,’” Kim said. “We just play. We have some sort of telepathic communication that has transcended both our friendship and our musical relationship.”
The festival’s program reflects the arc of that friendship. The two will open with a Prokofiev violin and piano sonata they first rehearsed together in a stuffy Juilliard practice room and in Ohashi’s studio apartment, trying to make sense of difficult notes and rhythms. They return to it now, decades later, with what Kim described as more maturity. A set of variations by Olivier Messiaen follows, a piece that once seemed impossibly abstract to both of them and now reads, Kim said, as surprisingly approachable. The program closes with Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending,” a pastoral work for violin and piano based on a poem about a bird in flight, a piece Kim considers cinematic — the kind that lets every listener invent their own story inside it.
“I’m very drawn to it because there’s a certain peacefulness it brings. It’s like a celebration of friendships,” Kim said.
The festival also features pianist Orli Shaham alongside Ohashi in a program of four-hand piano works. Shaham, a prolific performer with appearances spanning Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House, is another figure from Ohashi’s Juilliard years, the two having met as children in the Juilliard Pre-College program.
The festival will also include Salix Piano Trio: violinist Joanna Maurer, cellist Alberto Parrini, and pianist Anna Stoytcheva, who founded the ensemble in New York in 2023 after more than two decades of performing together in other combinations.
Stoytcheva, who was born in Bulgaria and began studying piano at four and a half, has known Ohashi since her own student days at Juilliard in the 1990s. Stoytcheva’s program is built entirely around women composers — trios by Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, and Ines Segev, the last of which received its world premiere in New York on June 3. The West Windsor Music Festival will be only the second time they perform it.
“Music is the most special way to communicate without words,” Stoytcheva said. “Every piece has its own different emotional language. They can come out of it feeling like their soul was touched in some way.”
The West Windsor Music Festival was never meant to feel like a buttoned-up night at the symphony, and Ohashi knew that classical music can be intimidating: the unspoken rules about when to clap, what to wear, how to listen. Here, none of that applies. Applause is welcome at any time. The musicians speak about the pieces before they play them. And in a hall as small as West Windsor, the distance between performer and audience nearly disappears.
Performing in Vermont, Ohashi said, does something to the music itself. “Your senses are heightened,” she said. “I think because you’re just surrounded by nature.” The audiences, she has found, arrive in that same spirit — curious, warm, and ready for wherever the music takes them. “They’re just so ready to go on the ride with us.”
It is the connection between the landscape, the room, the performers and audience that Ohashi has spent five years nurturing. She hopes anyone walking in for the first time, classical music novice or otherwise, will feel it too.
“I just hope they have a really good time,” she said. “That maybe they come away with something new; a feeling they’ve never had before, a piece they’ve never heard. It could be anything, really.”
At its core, the festival is a deeply personal undertaking for Ohashi. She calls it, only half-jokingly, a selfish one. “It nourishes my soul,” she said. “Being able to share it with people, in that moment — it just makes you feel alive.”
The West Windsor Music Festival runs June 26–28 at the Town Hall, 22 Brownsville-Hartland Road, Brownsville, Vt. The festival opens Friday, June 26, with pianist Orli Shaham joining Ohashi for an evening of four-hand piano works. The Salix Piano Trio performs Saturday, June 27. Ohashi and Kim close out the weekend on Sunday, June 28. A free children’s concert featuring four-hand piano and origami is also scheduled. Tickets are $25 per concert or $60 for a three-concert festival pass; seniors and children 12 and under pay $15. Tickets are available at westwindsorvtmusicfestival.com or at the door.