Sandbox Percussion Announces 2025-26 Season

New York (September 15, 2025) — The GRAMMY®-nominated group Sandbox Percussion, the first percussion ensemble to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant, announces its 15th season, highlighting the group’s collaborations with some of today’s most important composers and artists, including Tyshawn Sorey, Kristin Lee, The Crossing, Matthew Aucoin, and Conor Hanick. The group appears at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Omaha-based arts center KANEKO, among a variety of other prestigious venues. Please see below for all concert dates and details. 

Building on the success of their GRAMMY-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Seven Pillars—which has captivated audiences from Paris to Beijing—Sandbox Percussion and composer Andy Akiho embark on a project in the 2025-26 season to create a new work with Akiho joining on steelpan. The project results from a 2024 Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission; “Pentalateral I,” the first completed movement, is available now as a single on all streaming platforms. Throughout the season, the quintet continues to create and record the rest of the piece, giving premieres of individual movements in select venues; in Omaha, NE, they perform at KANEKO, the arts center founded by Jun Kaneko. The full work will be completed in summer 2026.

This season Sandbox Percussion also continues to champion Re(new)al, composer Viet Cuong’s green energy and environment-themed 2017 concerto for percussion quartet, inspired by the power of hydro, wind, and solar energies. Performances of Re(new)al take place with the Columbus Symphony, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Duke University Wind Symphony, Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, and Topeka Symphony. At the end of the season, Sandbox Percussion and Cuong reunite for the world premiere of a yet-untitled new work to be performed with the Albany Symphony, which commissioned and premiered Re(new)al.

Sandbox Percussion is joined by violinist Kristin Lee, the founder and artistic director of Seattle’s Emerald City Music, for FIVE!, a program featuring the world premiere of a work by Vivian Fung co-commissioned by Emerald City Music, where Sandbox Percussion is ensemble-in-residence in 2025-26; and for the Pacific Northwest premiere of recent works by Joan Tower’s To Sing or Dance and Gabriella Smith’s FIVE. The cutting-edge program, presented in Seattle and Olympia, WA, showcases the diverse interplay possible between violin and percussion.

Lee also joins Sandbox Percussion at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for Sonic Spectrum IV, a program that includes pioneering composer Lou Harrison’s rarely performed Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra. The unusual instrumentation calls for two suspended wash tubs, two resonating clock coils, and six flowerpots, besides conventional percussion instruments.

Over the season, Sandbox Percussion performs Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt’s enthralling minimalist work Canto Ostinato. Shaped by softly chiming pulses and deeply satisfying harmonic shifts, Canto Ostinato radiates with warmth, spaciousness, and quiet luminosity, offering both freedom and structure. The group’s arrangement for percussion quartet and two pianos—played by Matthew Aucoin and Conor Hanick—was performed at Lincoln Center’s latest Summer for the City festival. Sandbox Percussion revisit the piece with Aucoin and Hanick at Cal Performances and Dumbarton Oaks. Multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, Metropolis Ensemble, and students and faculty from the University of Washington School of Music also join Sandbox Percussion for two performances at Emerald City Music. A new recording by Sandbox Percussion, Erik Hall, and Metropolis Ensemble is scheduled for release in spring 2026 on the Western Vinyl label.

At Duke University’s Duke Arts (Durham, NC), Sandbox Percussion and the Tyshawn Sorey Trio collaborate on Max Roach at 100, a special tribute show that premiered last season, exploring the legacy of the influential jazz drummer. Each group performs its own set first, followed by Sorey’s Cogitations, composed for the two groups joining forces as a septet. “Throughout the performance, Sandbox members displayed the rhythmic affect just as easily as their melodic prowess shined,” wrote CapitalBop about last season’s performance at the Library of Congress.

The group also joins the Philadelphia-based chamber choir The Crossing at Stanford Live, conducted by Donald Nally. The program consists of You Are Who I Love, the last work by the late composer Harold Meltzer, set to a poem by Aracelis Girmay about the undocumented immigrant experience in the U.S. Meltzer composed the piece for the two ensembles, calling for ample interplay between them. It is one of his largest and most thoughtful pieces, with the four percussionists playing over 100 instruments.

Throughout the season, Sandbox Percussion also plays music by a variety of 20th-century and contemporary composers that include Christopher Cerrone—a free performance at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium—Andy Akiho, Amy Beth Kirsten, Michael Torke, David Crowell, and Julius Eastman. Please visit sandboxpercussion.com.

Photos by Alex Lee, 2024

Sandbox Percussion: 2025-26 Season

• Sept. 16: Morgantown, WV — Recital at Summit Chamber Music Series, 7:30 PM
• Sept. 30: New York City, Tishman Concert Hall — Christopher Cerrone Portrait Concert at The New School, 7:30 PM
• Oct. 4: Brewster, MA — Recital at Cape Cod Performing Arts Center, 7:30 PM
• Oct. 5: Lenox, MA — Recital at Tanglewood Learning Institute, 4 PM
• Oct. 15: Omaha, NE — The KANEKO: Andy Akiho & Sandbox Percussion, 7 PM
• Nov. 8: Springfield, MO — Juanita K. Hammons Hall: Re(new)al with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, 7:30 PM
• Nov. 19, Asheville, NC — Recital at Black Mountain College Museum Arts Center, 7:30 PM
• Nov. 20: Durham, NC, Baldwin Auditorium — Re(new)al, with the Duke University Wind Symphony, 7:30 PM
• Nov. 21: Durham, NC, Baldwin Auditorium — Max Roach at 100: Collaboration with the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, 7:30 PM
• Nov. 23: Baltimore, MD, Leith Symington Griswold Hall — Canto Ostinato with Peabody Percussion Group, 7:30 PM
• Dec. 12: Wallingford, CT, Paul Mellon Arts Center — Recital at Choate Rosemary Hall, 7:30 PM
• Jan. 24: Topeka, KS, White Concert Hall — Re(new)al, with the Topeka Symphony, 7:30 PM
• Feb. 2: Baltimore, MD, Griswold Hall — Faculty Recital at the Peabody Institute, 7:30 PM
• Feb. 9: Ruston, LA, Howard Center for the Performing Arts — Masterclass and Recital at Louisiana Tech University, 7 PM
• Feb. 22: Berkeley, CA, Zellerbach Auditorium — Canto Ostinato, An AMOC* & Sandbox Percussion co-production, 3 PM
• Feb. 25: Stanford, CA, Bing Concert Hall — You Are Who I Love, with The Crossing, 7:30 PM
• March 3: Williamsburg, VA, Williamsburg Community Chapel — Re(new)al, with the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, 7:30 PM
• March 6: Seattle, WA, 415 Westlake — FIVE! Sandbox Percussion and Kristin Lee, 8 PM
• March 7: Olympia, WA, Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts — FIVE! Sandbox Percussion and Kristin Lee, 7:30 PM
• March 27 & 28: Columbus, OH, Ohio Theatre — Re(new)al, with the Columbus Symphony, 7:30 PM
• April 4: Centre County, PA, Recital at Penn State University, 7:30 PM 
• April 10: Seattle, WA, 415 Westlake — Canto Ostinato, with UWashington School of Music, 8 PM
• April 11: Olympia, WA, Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts — Canto Ostinato, with UWashington School of Music, 7:30 PM
• April 13: Rockville, MD, Robert E. Parilla Performing Arts Center — Collaboration with Violinist Kristin Lee, 7:30 PM
• April 15: Cincinnati, OH, Cohen Family Studio Theater — Collaboration with Violinist Kristin Lee, 7:30 PM 
• April 19 & 20, 2026: Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks — Canto Ostinato, with Matthew Aucoin and Conor Hanick, 7 PM
• April 30, 2026: New York, NY, Rose Studio at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — Sonic Spectrum IV, 7:30 PM
• May 19, 2026: Salt Lake City, UT, Libby Gardner Concert Hall — Recital at Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City, 7:30 PM
• June 6, 2026: Albany, NY, EMPAC — Viet Cuong *World Premiere,* with the Albany Symphony, 7:30 PM

More about Sandbox Percussion
Hailed as “exhilarating” by The New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, the Brooklyn-based Sandbox Percussion champions living composers through its unwavering dedication to the art of contemporary chamber music. The group was formed in 2011 by Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney. In 2024, they became the first percussion ensemble to be awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.

The quartet’s 2021 album Seven Pillars, featuring Andy Akiho’s title piece, was nominated for two GRAMMY® awards—Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The feature-length work was described by The New York Times as a “brooding, thrilling, Mahler-length taxonomy of noise,” and “as pure as music gets.” It is Sandbox Percussion’s largest commission to date. 

In 2024 Sandbox Percussion recorded percussion music for its first feature film, the Oscar-nominated The Wild Robot (DreamWorks), scored by Kris Bowers. Don’t Look Down, the group’s most recent album (PENTATONE), celebrates its long collaboration with Christopher Cerrone. In 2025, Sandbox Percussion presented a genre-defying program on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series. The members of Sandbox Percussion are on faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, The New School’s College of Performing Arts, and at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.

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