The UBS Chamber Music Festival of Lexington will present its 2009 edition during the last week in August, with concerts planned for Friday and Saturday evenings, August 28 and 29, and the popular Sunday family friendly event set for Sunday afternoon, August 30. The programs will be held again this summer at the Fasig-Tipton Pavilion on Newtown Pike. Scheduled also again this year are piano and violin master classes to be held in mid-week, free and open to the public.

Lexington’s own Nathan Cole, violin, will again serve as artistic director, joined by Akiko Tarumoto, violin; Burchard Tang, viola; Priscilla Lee, cello; and Alessio Bax, piano. Bax is the recent winner of a prestigious 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, awarded to talented instrumentalists judged to have great potential for solo careers. Past recipients of this high honor have included Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, and Gil Shaham.

Bill and Beverly Fortune will serve as Honorary Chairs of the festival this year, succeeding Don and Mira Ball. World-class fiber artist and well-known University of Kentucky professor Arturo Alonzo Sandoval has created a stunning original piece that will serve as the visual hallmark of this year’s festival.

The 2009 festival will again feature a composer-in- residence, made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Ronald Saykaly and his wife Teresa Garbulinska. The composer-in-residence Saykaly and Garbulinska sponsored last year—Daniel Thomas Davis— recently won the 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for “Book of Songs and Visions,” the piece he wrote for 2008 festival. The 2009 composer-in-residence will be Clancy Newman, who is also a celebrated cellist. Newman will write a piano quintet that will have its world premiere at the festival concert on Saturday, August 30. Newman, also winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, is a native of Australia. A graduate of the five-year exchange program between the Juilliard School and Columbia University, he has performed as a soloist in most of the country’s major cities, and has been a member of Chamber Music Society Two at Lincoln Center and Musicians from Marlboro. He is currently a member of the Chicago Chamber Musicians and the Weiss-Kaplan-Newman trio. As a composer, he has been featured on the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s “Double Exposure” series and the Chicago Chamber Musicians’ “Freshly Scored” series, and has received commissions from Astral Artists, the Barnett Foundation, and the Carpe Diem String Quartet.

Newman will be in residence for the entire Festival Week, and will perform with the group on stage during one of the concert evenings. “We are thrilled to be able to again offer our community a world premiere,” said festival president Charlie Stone. “We are very grateful to Ron and Teresa for their support of this special feature of our festival. We are also mindful of the great support we get from founding sponsors UBS and Highbridge, and are so pleased as well to have important support from LexArts, the Lexington Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, and other businesses and individuals who collectively make our festival a reality each summer.”