On a Thursday at noon, when downtown Burlington is mostly office workers hunting lunch, the Cathedral Church of St. Paul will fill with the sound of a violin and a piano. Violinist Elizabeth Chang and pianist Jiayan Sun will perform a program of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in the cathedral's soaring concrete-and-glass interior. There is no ticket, no reservation, no charge. You walk in, find a seat, and listen.
The pairing is not incidental. Chang is the artistic director of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, the summer string conservatory that has been a fixture of the Burlington area for two decades. Sun is a Steinway Artist whose performances the New York Times has called "revelatory." Together they will play three works that trace the arc from the Classical era into early Romanticism: Mozart's Violin Sonata in B-Flat Major, K. 454; Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 8 in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3; and Schubert's Fantasy for Violin and Piano.
The festival itself has a story worth knowing. It was founded by the violinist Kevin Lawrence, who had spent years running the Killington Music Festival before deciding to build something new in the Queen City. As Seven Days reported, the idea came to him on one of his annual trips to the Burlington area to play live on Vermont Public Radio. The festival began as a four-week summer session for young string players, drawing students from across the United States and several other countries to study with professional teachers from conservatories and universities. Its stated goal, in the festival's own words, is to "cultivate and empower the next generation of classical music ambassadors."
For seventeen years, Lawrence led the festival. Then came 2020, when the pandemic forced the entire program online. The following summer, the festival roared back to in-person operations, with 170 students living at Saint Michael's College in Colchester and performing there and at the Elley-Long Music Center. The effort worked, but it took a toll. "It was a big deal to have a program in person; everyone was walking on clouds," Lawrence told Seven Days. "But it just about killed me." He announced he was stepping down after seventeen years, and by that September the board had chosen his successor from several qualified applicants: Elizabeth Chang, who had been on the festival's faculty since 2007.
Chang brought a deep resume to the role. A native New Yorker and Harvard graduate, she is a professor of violin at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and teaches in the pre-college division of the Juilliard School. She has founded or co-founded several smaller festivals she continues to lead, including the Lighthouse Chamber Players, the Five College New Music Festival, and the UMass Amherst Bach Festival and Symposium. Before her academic appointments, she toured and recorded extensively with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Her discography includes solo recordings of works by Kirchner, Sessions, and Schoenberg, and of Szymanowski, Dohnanyi, and Bartok -- the latter selected by Audiophilia as a recording of the year.
Sun, her collaborator, has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Halle Orchestra, and the Chinese and RTE National Symphony Orchestras, among many others, and has appeared at the Verbier Festival, the Gstaad Menuhin Festival, and the Klavier-Festival Ruhr. He studied under the mentorship of Sir Andras Schiff, who invited him to give solo recitals across Europe as part of Schiff's "Building Bridges" project. He has won prizes at the Leeds, Dublin, and Cleveland international piano competitions. The Toronto Star praised his "technically flawless, poetically inspired and immensely assured playing."
The venue is a character in its own right. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, at 2 Cherry Street, sits a few blocks west of the Church Street Marketplace, across from Battery Street Park, with views toward Lake Champlain. Its congregation dates to 1830, when about fifty-five people gathered in a Burlington hotel to start a new Episcopal church. The first building went up in 1832 in the Gothic Revival style. That structure served for well over a century, until it was destroyed by fire in 1971. What rose in its place -- consecrated on November 11, 1973 -- was something entirely different: a Modernist building of stressed concrete, designed by Burlington Associates, that is often described as Brutalist. It is a striking departure from the Gothic original, and it has proven to be an unusually flexible and acoustically supportive space.
That was no accident. According to Cathedral Arts, after the old cathedral burned, the Cathedral Arts Committee specifically charged the Building Committee with creating a space suitable for vocal, instrumental, dance, and dramatic performances, as well as for the display of visual art. The result was so successful that in 1976 the Vermont Council on the Arts cited the cathedral for "building not just a structure but a community." Cathedral-sponsored arts events, in fact, date back well before the current building's dedication.
The cathedral also holds a 1927 Steinway B piano, and its Vedder Van Dyck tracker organ was designed by Karl Wilhelm of Montreal. Cathedral Arts, an independent nonprofit, runs a regular season of ticketed weekend performances plus a series of free Thursday lunch-time events -- the series this recital belongs to. The space's flexible seating accommodates everything from intimate gatherings to several hundred people.
That is the setting for this concert: a free midday recital, part of a tradition of public arts at the cathedral that stretches back more than half a century, performed by two musicians at the height of their craft. It runs from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 15, 2026. No ticket required. Just walk in.