by Stephanie Manning
“HOME,” the theme of this year’s ENCORE – Gates Mills Music & Ideas Festival, has been on Jinjoo Cho’s mind for a while.
“I am a homebody that is not allowed to be at home very much,” the artistic director and violinist said, speaking by phone from a midpoint in her drive from Chicago to Cleveland. She’s lived in Chicago since 2024, when she began teaching at Northwestern University, and she spent six years before that at McGill University in Montreal.
Given that relocation back to the U.S. from Canada, the concept of home “encapsulates a lot of thoughts I’ve had throughout the past two years,” she said. “It’s kind of a peculiar science what conditions need to be met for someone to truly feel secure and safe. This festival theme is really my attempt to pinpoint what those conditions are.”
From June 5 to June 20, the eleventh season of ENCORE’s Music & Ideas Festival will present five headline concerts in different venues around Northeast Ohio. These events take place concurrently with the Summer Academy, which provides training, mentorship, and performance opportunities for young musicians ages 13 to 26. Tickets are available online.
The celebrations begin outdoors on June 5 with “My Home is a Thousand Places,” presented for free at The Grove in Mayfield Village. Dancer Yamini Kalluri joins the Verona String Quartet and other faculty performers perform music from all kinds of places and cultures — from composers Reena Esmail to Grażyna Bacewicz and Erberk Eryılmaz.
The next day, Cho presents her annual “Carte Blanche” at Federated Church in Chagrin Falls. Titled “Fantasies of Aino Sibelius,” the program is based on Cho’s experience touring Jean and Aino Sibelius’ home while in Finland to judge the 2025 Sibelius Violin Competition. “It was an incredibly inspiring experience,” she said. “He wrote his violin concerto right in that living room.”
The most contemporary program arrives on June 12 at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, titled “The American Dream is for Perfect People.” Alongside works by Charles Ives, Andy Akiho, and Jacob TV is Andrew Rindfleisch’s American Descent, which recently made headlines for its selection as a 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music.
Rindfleisch, a Cleveland-based composer, is “an incredible gem in our region,” Cho said. ENCORE’s efforts of securing funding to perform American Descent began far earlier than the Pulitzer Prize recognition, but the timing couldn’t be better.
The piece “really feels like his magnum opus,” Cho said. “So we’re really privileged to be able to show it to our students as well as the Cleveland community.”
The final two Saturdays bring “In Your Arms at Last” on June 13 at Federated Church — “a commentary on our loved ones” — as well as “Our Home at ENCORE” on June 20 at the Community House of Gates Mills.
Cho noted that the June 20 program will end with Shelley Washington’s SAY, which will involve all the Summer Academy students playing, stomping, and chanting together with the faculty. “We’ve never done that before, so it’s going to be really cool to see everybody together.”
Although the Summer Academy is typically hosted at Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills, current renovations to the Gilmour campus mean that this year’s students are being hosted at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory. Cho stressed that while ENCORE is grateful to BW for the support — and the program offerings are identical — the relocation is only temporary.
“We’ve been really lucky to have a lot of support from the east suburb communities in Cleveland,” she said. The concerts are “very much in the vicinity of the Gates Mills community, so they’ll be able to see us in their backyard as well.”
One big change this year, that may or may not be temporary, is the separation between the “Music” and “Ideas” components of the Festival. In the past, ENCORE’s programs characteristically began with a guest lecture on a topic related to the concert, essentially baking in the pre-concert talk with the concert itself. This year, the lecture portion will be held separately at the BW campus, where the public masterclasses will also be held.
Among ENCORE’s audience, “we have a lot of people who were more avid music lovers, and they felt a little bit anxious for the music to start,” Cho said. “So we’re trying to separate those events a little bit this year.”
No matter how people choose to participate, “I really invite everybody to come and join us for these three weeks,” she said. “I hope that the Cleveland community will be able to sit in the audience with, and have a chance to speak with, these incredibly talented young artists of the future.”
Published on ClevelandClassical.com June 4, 2026
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