Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: $27.00 to $32.00

About This Show

The Koger Center and ColaJazz Foundation are excited to present to you the new 2026 Live in the Lobby Jazz season! Featuring 6 stunning performances, you can get your season tickets today to get every show for one low price.

Created as a partnership between the Koger Center for the Arts and the ColaJazz Foundation, Live in the Lobby 2026 will consist of six concerts held throughout the Koger Center facility. Join us to experience this one-of-a-kind series designed for audiences seeking premier jazz and specialty experiences in an exceptional setting. 

About the Artist

Vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Mar Vilaseca was born in 1998, in Barcelona, Spain. Mar grew up in a musical environment and learned how to play and sing at a very young age, being exposed to a wide variety of music. She was classically trained in piano and traditional harmony at the Conservatorio del Liceo. At the age of 14, she started singing professionally in her father’s band, where she began her career in jazz and modern music.

Mar finished her classical studies in 2016 and despite her love for classical piano, she decided to focus her career on vocal jazz. She was accepted at the Escuela Superior de Música de Catalunya, where she studied her undergraduate degree in Jazz Voice Performance, graduating in 2020. During those college years, Mar became more and more passionate about the music and history of jazz and took her first of many trips to New York City. The diversity of culture and music captivated her, and soon she would decide to move to the United States. In 2020, before taking that step, she released her first album entitled Find the Way, which presents all original compositions. The recording was released by a British Label named Ubuntu Music.

Subsequently, Mar moved to New York to study her Master of Music in Jazz Studies at The Juilliard School, with Professors Wynton Marsalis, Carla Cook, Elio Villafranca, Kenny Washington, and Donald Vega among others. She gained experience in such different music majors including performance, education, music business, arranging and production, and she expanded her repertoire in multiple music genres. She graduated in 2022 with the Juilliard Career Advancement Fellowship Award.

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Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Student chamber music ensembles of diverse instrumentation (typically including string quartets, piano trios, wind quintets and mixed instrument groups) perform chamber music from Baroque to contemporary.

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: $5 USC Students; $25 General Admission

The School of Music’s illustrious piano faculty (Phillip Bush, Scott Price, and Nicholas Susi) will perform.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 USC Students; $25 General Admission

Described in The WholeNote as “an innovative musician and aggressive thinker with a gift for keyboard brilliance,” Dr. Nicholas Susi enjoys a multifaceted career living out his deep love of music. He recognizes that Classical music has been a transformative force in his life, and seeks to share its power with others through his teaching and performing.

Dr. Susi is Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of South Carolina, President of the American Matthay Association and Associate Director of the Southeastern Piano Festival. He previously taught piano and music theory at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN. He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan, with previous studies at the University of Kansas and at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln as a two-time DAAD grantee. Primary teachers include Zena Ilyashov, Jack Winerock, Nina Tichman and Arthur Greene.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 USC Students; $25 General Admission

Pianist and curator Pedja Mužijevic has defined his career with creative programming, unusual combinations of new and old music, and lasting collaborations with artists and ensembles. 

Highlights of 2025/26 season include Homage to Mixtapes recital program at UNLTD Powered by Verbier Festival, 92NY and Southeastern Piano Festival in Columbia, SC; Chopin and Beethoven piano concertos with Fort Worth Symphony and String Orchestra of the Rockies in Missoula, MT, as well as leading Concert in 21st Century workshops at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, The Juilliard School in New York, Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, Pedja lives in New York City, where he is the artistic administrator at Baryshnikov Arts, an arts organization that supports artists in all disciplines through presentations and residencies. Pedja is also the artistic advisor at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, a 12,500 acre working sheep and cattle ranch with large-scale outdoor sculptures and a summer concert season. Pedja directs workshops entitled Concert in 21st Century for young musicians from Verbier Festival Academy and Banff Center to Colburn and Longy schools, in which he examines concert from perspectives of programming, stage presentation, marketing and funding in an attempt to make it more accessible and relevant today.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 USC students; $25 general admission

Hailed by The New York Times as “prodigiously accomplished and exciting” and as one of the piano’s “brilliant stars,” pianist Blair McMillen has forged a musical life that is unbounded by convention. He is well-known for his advocacy of living composers and contemporary music, as well as for championing very early keyboard music and more recent neglected masterpieces. For more than two decades, McMillen has divided his time as piano soloist, chamber musician, music festival director, and educator/teacher.

Blair McMillen is the co-founder and co-director of the Rite of Summer Music Festival. Rite of Summer is a free, outdoor contemporary-music series held on New York City’s Governors Island. The festival has presented boundary-pushing artists such as the JACK Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Tigue, Theo Bleckmann, Todd Reynolds, Contemporaneous, and Don Byron’s New Gospel Quintet. Celebrating its twelfth season in 2023, Rite of Summer is the only annual music festival on Governors Island, a place the New Yorker has called “an enormous playground for the arts.”

Blair McMillen holds degrees from Oberlin College, Manhattan School of Music, and The Juilliard School.

Blair McMillen has performed in major concert venues in New York, throughout the United States, and around the world. 

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: TBD

First prize winner of the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Concert Artist Guild International Competition, Korean-American pianist Soyeon Kate Lee has been lauded by The New York Times as a pianist with “a huge, richly varied sound, a lively imagination and a firm sense of style,” and by The Washington Post for her “stunning command of the keyboard.”

Highlights of recent seasons include appearances at the National Gallery, Library of Congress, Gina Bachauer Concerts, Purdue Convocations, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on tour, San Francisco Performances, Camerata Pacifica tour, Chamber Music Chicago and the Cleveland Art Museum. She was a member of Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s Bowers program, and is a regular participant in numerous chamber music festivals including the Great Lakes, Santa Fe and Music Mountain Chamber Music Festivals. Ms. Lee has collaborated with conductors Carlos Miguel Prieto, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jahja Ling, and Jorge Mester with the London, San Diego, Hawaii, Louisiana, Naples symphony orchestras among others.

She has commissioned works by prominent composers and has given world premieres of works written by Frederic Rzewski, Paola Prestini, Marc-André Hamelin, Alexander Goehr, Gabriela Lena Frank, Texu Kim and Huang Ruo.

As a Naxos recording artist, her discography spans a wide range of repertoire from two volumes of Scarlatti Sonatas, Liszt Opera Transcriptions, two volumes of Scriabin, and Clementi Sonatas. Ms. Lee’s recording of Re!nvented under the E1/Entertainment One (formerly Koch Classics) label garnered her a feature review in Gramophone Magazine and the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: $5 USC Students; $25 General Admission

Festival participants compete for a chance to perform with the South Carolina Philharmonic in a Masterworks concert and more than $10,000 in cash prizes.

Tickets go on sale May 1!

Purchase tickets in person at the Koger Center Box Office or online. New this year: save $ by purchasing an event package of all SEPF signature concerts!

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Admission Cost: FREE

Echoes of Identity brings together a rich and varied tapestry of violin music by Jewish composers, highlighting both heritage and individuality of expression. Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem stands as a cornerstone of the repertoire, evoking the spiritual depth and intensity of Jewish tradition, while Meira Warshauer’s Yiddish Fantasy offers a vibrant and personal reflection on cultural memory from a contemporary voice rooted here in Columbia, South Carolina. The program is further enriched by works of Israeli composers Paul Ben-Haim and Shulamit Ran, whose music expands the narrative in strikingly different ways, blending lyricism, modernism, and rhythmic vitality. Together, these works reveal the diversity and expressive breadth of Jewish composers across time and place.