BRUNSWICK – The Bowdoin International Music Festival will open its 2007 MusicFest concert series Friday, June 29, with a performance of Johannes Brahms’ great Piano Quintet in F-Minor, Op. 34. Featured will be renowned pianist Olivier Gardon with a festival faculty string quartet led by violinist and festival director Lewis Kaplan.

Besides Brahms, the evening’s program will include Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestucke (Fantasy Pieces) for Cello and Piano, Op. 73, and Edward Elgar’s Violin Sonata in E Minor, Op. 82.

The 2007 MusicFest season will celebrate “The Great Romantics.” All performances are at 8 p.m. Friday at Crooker Theatre in Brunswick High School. Other concert dates are July 6, 13, 20 and 27, and Aug. 3.

The Brahms piano quintet has had an illustrious association with the Bowdoin Music Festival, including performances by pianist Emanuel Ax, virtuoso violinist Michael Rabin and cellist David Soyer. Joining Kaplan and Gardon June 29 are festival faculty members Maria Schleuning, violin, Dallas Symphony; Michael Klotz, viola, Amernet String Quartet; and cellist David Ying, Ying Quartet.

Ying will also open the concert, performing the Schumann Fantasy Pieces with pianist Julian Martin. Ying, who teaches at the Eastman School of Music, has won awards as a solo cellist in the Naumburg International Cello, the Washington International and the Tchaikovsky International Cello competitions. Martin, on the faculty of The Juilliard School, won the Montevideo International Competition in 1975, followed by major prizes from the Casadesus, Kapell, and Bachauer competitions. This is his first collaboration with Ying at the Bowdoin Festival.

Longtime festival favorites Peter Basquin and Ani Schnarch will perform the Elgar sonata in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Basquin, a top prize winner at the Montreal International Piano Competition in 1975, teaches and is director of piano studies and professor of music at Hunter College, City University of New York, as well as director emeritus of the City University Graduate Center’s DMA program. Schnarch, who has performed as a soloist throughout Europe, Russia, Israel, and the United States, is a professor of violin at the Royal College of Music, London.

For concert information and tickets, call the festival box office at 725-3895 or visit www.bowdoinfestival.org.