Our Mission

The Epiphany Festival is a week-long musical festival that offers live performances of lesser-heard classical masterworks by young professional musicians in Washington DC.

What We Do

The Epiphany Festival was born out of a simple question: which classical masterworks are people not hearing in Washington DC? How do we broaden our city’s already robust musical offering? The goal of the festival is to offer live performances of lesser-heard masterpieces, performed by young professional musicians. To this end, our first season included a mix of repertoire, including Brahms’ beloved first set of Liebeslieder-Wälzer, Schönberg’s lushly romantic Kammersymphonie no. 1, Mozart’s timeless Serenade in C minor for eight winds, and, in a known premiere for the DC region, Franz Schreker’s Der Wind (1909). Each of these pieces has been carefully selected and would otherwise not be heard in a professional setting in our city this season.

Our second season in 2020 offered a different perspective on Ludwig van Beethoven as part of his 250th anniversary year. Works by Beethoven were presented alongside those of Luigi Cherubini and Gioachino Rossini, two of his famous European contemporaries. The 2020 festival featured the inauguration of our festival choir and included a commissioned work by Elisabeth Mehl Greene for soprano and piano.

2024 marks our return and our third season, dedicated to the works of Gustav Holst. More information about our concerts in the upcoming 2024 season are available on this site, as well as information about ticketing and donations. We appreciate your interest, and look forward to seeing you at a concert in January!

Our Director

Like Mozart, Fauré, and countless others before him, Andrew Jonathan Welch is a musician whose career combines performance, composition, leadership and education. Andrew serves as the artistic director of the Falmouth Chorale, which celebrates its 60th season this year with seven different programs including works by Mozart, Handel, Lutoslawski, and Rosephanye Powell, among others. Other upcoming performances include with the Epiphany Festival, a music festival he founded and leads in Washington DC, and a conducting appearance with the Falmouth Chamber Players Orchestra. This summer he completed two piano-vocal reductions at the personal request of John Harbison and revised his 13-instrument reorchestration of Elgar’s The Music Makers, which will be performed by the City Choir of Washington this spring. Recent recording projects include a CD released on Tonsehen with trumpet player Luke Spence and with saxophonist, Noah Getz on Albany Records with whom he has premiered esteemed jazz saxophonist Chris Potter’s Sonata for Soprano Saxophone.

Additionally, Andrew is the director of music ministries at Allin Congregational Church in Dedham, MA, where he conducts the Allin Choir and performs weekly on the church’s historic 1912 Opus 197 E. M. Skinner organ. Andrew has written over twelve anthems for the Allin choir and has inaugurated an annual lessons and carols service alongside other concert performances for the group. He has also designed and instituted a young artist-in-residence program which has brought numerous high school students to Allin to study church music.

Andrew studied piano performance at American University, the University of Maryland, and the Aspen Music Festival. Currently, he teaches music theory and chamber music as part of the music faculty at Brown University and the New England Conservatory. He also maintains a private studio out of his home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he teaches piano and coaches professional singers.

Our inspiration comes from the countless experiences of beauty, both subtle and apparent, that surround us every day. Among the countless inspirational stewards with which Andrew has been privileged to traverse the frontier of music, he counts his principal teacher Rita Sloan, Yuliya Gorenman, Andrew Harley, Audrey Andrist, Carmen Balthrop, and his friend, Richard Giarusso, among the most influential.