Fall 2008 Concert - Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Pro Musica Hebraica Presents
ARC Ensemble of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Canada

The Terrace Theater
The Kennedy Center
Washington, DC
7:30 PM


Spring 2009 Concert - Thursday, March 19, 2009

Pro Musica Hebraica Presents
The Biava Quartet with mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, baritone Alexander Tall, and pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski

The Terrace Theater
The Kennedy Center
Washington, DC
7:30 PM

 
Spring 2009 Concert

On March 19, 2009, Pro Musica Hebraica presented the Biava Quartet (Austin Hartman and Hyunsu Ko, violins, Mary Persin, viola, and Jason Calloway, cello) in a repeat appearance. In this concert, the critically acclaimed dynamic young quartet, currently the Lisa Arnhold Quartet in Residence at the Juilliard School, delved further into the music of the St. Petersburg Jewish composers. Joined by special guests mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, baritone Alexander Tall, and pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski, they performed Leo Zeitlin's vocal suite and forgotten string quartet masterpieces by violin virtuoso Joseph Achron, Aleksandr Zhitomirskii, and Russian-born Hollywood film composer Michel Michelet. They paired these works with Dmitrii Shostakovich's stirring Fourth String Quartet, itself inspired by the same Jewish folk traditions on which his fellow colleagues drew.

The Biava Quartet is recognized as one of today's most exciting young American string quartets. Winner of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award and top prizes at the Premio Borciani and London International Competitions, the Quartet has established an enthusiastic following in the United States and abroad, impressing audiences with its sensitive artistry and communicative powers. Formed in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Quartet takes its name from Maestro Luis Biava, a mentor since its inception.

 
Fall 2008 Concert

On November 18, 2008, Pro Musica Hebraica proudly presented ARC - the ensemble-in-residence of Canada's Royal Conservatory of Music - in the second concert of its acclaimed new series devoted to Jewish composers. The Grammy-nominated ARC, performed two major wartime works by the enigmatic, twentieth-century master Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996), a Polish Jewish émigré to the Soviet Union whose music has frequently drawn comparisons to his friend and mentor, Dmitri Shostakovich. They paired these unknown masterpieces, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1947) and the Quintet for Piano and Strings (1944) with the haunting Passacaille of Szymon Laks (1901-1983), composed in Paris in 1947, shortly after his liberation from Auschwitz. Joining these works was another piece written in the aftermath of World War I and one of the most famous pieces of Jewish music to emerge from the pen of a non-Jewish composer, the Overture on Hebrew Themes (1919) by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953).

This concert also featured a surprise American premiere of an extremely rare work by the Hungarian Jewish composer Sándor Vándor, whose music has only recently been recovered and is completely unknown, even in Hungary. Vándor was born in 1901 in Miskolc, Hungary. He studied in Leipzig with Paul Graener (who would later take a position with the Reichsmusikkammer) and worked in Italy as a vocal coach and conductor. He returned to Hungary in 1932, took over the highly regarded Szalmás Choir and became an influential figure in Hungarian musical life. He was rounded up to work in a forced labor camp in November 1944 and died of exhaustion at Sopronbánfalva in Western Hungary, two months later - just days before the liberation of Pest. In Washington, the ARC Ensemble performed his piece "Aria," for cello and piano.

ARC is the ensemble-in-residence of Canada's Royal Conservatory of Music; its members are all soloists and chamber musicians and senior faculty members of the Glenn Gould School, the Conservatory's professional training division. Performers for this concert will be violinists Erika Raum and Marie Bérard, violist Steven Dann, cellist Bryan Epperson, clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas, and pianists David Louie, piano and Dianne Werner under the direction of Artistic Director Simon Wynberg.

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