For the sixth consecutive year, the Eilat Chamber Music Festival will take place in Israel’s premier vacation resort on the Red Sea, offering tourists and music-lovers the opportunity to combine a spring sunshine vacation with world-class chamber music concerts, master-classes and workshops. One of the many annual cultural and musical events taking place in Eilat, the 6^th Eilat Chamber Music Festival will take place at the Eilat Theater from 17-26 March 2011with an international line-up that includes Gabrieli Consort & Players, Maria Juncal, Pieter Wispelwey, Elisabeth von Magnus, Dejan Lazic, Jerusalem Quartet, Chloe Hanslip, iPalpiti, Maxim Rysanov, Antony Pay and many others (www.eilat-festival.com)

The Eilat Chamber Music Festival, which was founded six years ago by artistic and general director Leonid Rozenberg, has hosted the best international and Israeli musicians performing music from the period of Monteverdi through to contemporary compositions. The festival, which takes place over the last two weekends in March, will mark the opening leg of the European tour of Gabrieli Consort & Players with J. S. Bach's St. John Passion, conducted by Paul McCreesh. The festival will also present the Spanish Flamenco dancer Maria Juncal and her ensemble in the performance Tercera Llamada.

Timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Purim, there will also be a special concert entitled The Venetian Masque, with music, theatre and comedy from the 16^th and 17^th centuries, performed by singers and musicians playing historical instruments. The concert will feature Grammy nominee Avi Avital on the Venetian Mandolin, sopranos Claire Meghnagi and Ye'ela Avital, Italian Baroque cello player Giordano Antonelli, music director and harpsichord player Yizhar Karshon.

The acclaimed iPalpiti orchestral ensemble of international laureates, directed by Eduard Schmieder, will once again serve as the festival’s ensemble-in-residence with three performances, including the opening concert. Festival-goers and music students may also attend master-classes and workshops. A new feature at the Festival will be the collaboration with the Keshet Eilon Music Center. The Center, based in Kibbutz Eilon, nurtures talented young violinists from Israel and overseas who attend its international Mastercourse each summer, joined by violists and cellists. The Keshet Eilon 2011 Spring Seminar will be part of the Eilat Festival.  Most of the teachers will also teach at the 2011 Spring Seminar.

The festival will celebrate 200 years to Liszt with a pianists competition; 150 years to Anton Arensky with a special concert featuring his chamber music, 100 years to the birth of Nino Rota – with a special concert and a photography exhibition; J. S. Bach's birthday on March 21^st with a strings competition; and will offer outdoor concerts, and special activities, among them amateur musicians' master-classes.