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Music Street-celebrating 11 YEARS

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    • Music Street Artists
    • Diane Katzenberg Braun
    • Eunghee Cho
    • Rainer Crosett
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    • Letitia Jap
    • Daniel Koo
    • Steven Laraia
    • Geneva Lewis
    • Li-Mei Liang
    • David Thomas Mather
    • Hannah Meloy
    • Vincent Turregano
    • Bethany Worrell
    • Alan Toda-Ambaras
    • Sangwon Lee
    • Sophia Szokolay
    • Yoonhee Lee
    • Mary-Alexandra Onstad
    • Josie Larsen
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January 20, 2024 Diane Katzenberg Braun

Louisa Hufstader

  • Monday, March 6, 2023 - 3:52pm

More than 50 listeners filled nearly every seat in the West Tisbury Library community room for Saturday’s concert by the chamber ensemble Music Street: pianist Diane Katzenberg Braun, violinist Sophia Anna Szokolay and cellist Alan Toda-Ambaras. Sampling some two centuries of classical music, from the Romantic era to the present day, the trio played lesser-known compositions from Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany and the United States. “I sometimes feel like Alice in Wonderland running down rabbit holes as I discover new works,” Ms. Braun told the audience. “Many of the compositions on this program are new discoveries and new to us, so it’s been really fun to put it together,” she said.

Music Street opened the concert with a sprightly allegro from a piano trio by 19th-century Russian composer Sergei Taneyev. A disciple of Tchaikovsky, Taneyev also intimidated the older composer, Ms. Braun said. “Tchaikovsky lived in dread of his criticisms... because Taneyev was the head of the Moscow Conservatory [and] he won first prize in piano and composition,” she said.

Introducing Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, for violin and piano, Ms. Szokolay noted that the 19th-century pianist and composer is generally overshadowed by the two male composers in her life: Johannes Brahms, who loved her, and Robert Schumann, who married her. “I feel like Clara deserves to hold her own,” said Ms. Szokolay, noting that the composer wrote 300 works, played her own music on tour and performed Three Romances for an “ecstatic” King George V of Hanover (the German kingdom later annexed by Prussia).

Light-footed and lushly Romantic, the three Schumann pieces led to an impressionist piano trio by Melanie Bonis, a French composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who tried to hide her sex by publishing as Mel Bonis. “Women were not respected as musicians or even professional people [at the time],” Ms. Braun said. But the composer’s secret was an open one. After Camille St.-Saëns heard the Bonis trio, Soir-Matin, in 1907, he said “I never thought a woman could write something such as this,” Ms. Braun told the audience. As played by Music Street on Saturday, the movement Soir was a tone poem of twilight in the gentle, gliding mode of Saint-Saëns’s warhorse The Swan, as Ms. Braun’s rippling piano blended with Mr. Toda-Ambaras’s deep-toned cello and Ms. Szokolay’s singing violin.

A pair of Ukrainian composers came next, both born in 1937 and one, Valentin Silvestrov, still living. “He was originally a civil engineer,” Mr. Toda-Ambaras said as he introduced Mr. Silvestrov’s Postlude III. Emerging as a composer in the 1960s, Mr. Silvestrov declined to follow the Soviet Union’s top-down aesthetic standards, Mr. Toda-Ambaras said. “Instead of going along with... the government, Silvestrov decided he was going to write his own style, and this may have contributed to his not being as promoted or well known,” he said. Written in 1982, Postlude III is a stately, almost reverently deliberate duet for cello and piano, from a composer whose work has been described by critics as “austere.” “It really takes you into a timeless space,” Ms. Braun said.

Mr. Toda-Ambaras and Ms. Braun continued with a duo by Nikolai Kapustin, who was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and died in 2020. Fascinated with jazz, but unable to improvise, Kapustin wrote works that manage to dance with one foot in the classical tradition and the other in modern jazz. Saturday’s audience heard the hopscotching duo Nearly Waltz, followed by Ms. Braun’s performance of Kapustin’s rollicking, blues-tinged Piano Prelude XVII.

Music Street concluded its concert with two works by contemporary female composers, Jessie Montgomery of New York and Stacy Garrop of Chicago. Ms. Montgomery’s two-movement duo for violin and cello, Antics and Serious Fun, took the arpeggiated sounds of 20th-century minimalism — think Philip Glass — to new, far-from-minimal places, adding pizzicato, slides and capering melodies. The work is a tribute to Ms. Montgomery’s friendship with cellist Adrian Taylor, for whom it was written, Ms. Szokolay said. “In [Montgomery’s] words, ‘It’s an ode to the friendship... with movements characterizing friendship, adventure, laughter and sometimes a little silliness,’” she said.

Ms. Garrop’s Jubilation was commissioned for the 60th anniversary of Chicago classical radio station WFMT in 2021, Ms. Braun said. The piano trio contains what is sometimes called an Easter egg in other media, such as films and comics: a hidden, but decipherable reference to something outside the work. “We’re playing in 9/8, 8/8 and 7/8,” Ms. Braun said, referring to the meter of the piece. “That is to reflect the frequency of the radio station,” she went on, as the audience started to laugh. “It’s 98.7.” The stirring, celebratory trio sent Saturday’s audience to its feet in a prolonged ovation.

Augmented by a clarinetist, Music Street performs the last of its three annual off-season concerts at the library in June.

← Greater Boston musicians bring classical performances to homeless shelters, hospitalsNEC Alumni Spotlight for National Giving Month →

“Music Street” brings sound to schools and shelters - The Martha's Vineyard Times, March 12, 2014

Most year-round Islanders are resolved to the fact that while the summer affords multiple opportunities to enjoy performances by visiting artists, the off-season is a relatively quiet time for the arts.

This Friday, however, Vineyarders will have the chance to enjoy a vocal concert by two accomplished singers from Boston. An organization called “Music Street” will be hosting a public performance at the Performing Arts Center at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School on Friday morning at 11 am.

Two professional singers — soprano Bethany Worrell and tenor Sean Lair — will present a repertoire of music spanning the ages and genres. Accompanying them will be Diane Katzenberg Braun, a collaborative pianist for the New England Conservatory of Music. Through her affiliation with the acclaimed Boston music school, Ms. Braun has performed with and mentored a number of talented young musicians. The two that she has recruited for the Vineyard show are recent grads who have made names for themselves as singers on the national and international scene.

Bethany Worrell has performed as a soloist in Boston, Chicago, Malibu, Florence, Italy, and Salzburg, Austria, where she performed at the famed Schloss Mirabell Marble Hall. As a choral member, Ms. Worrell has also appeared at both Carnegie Hall in New York and Symphony Hall in Boston. Ms. Worrell has won a number of awards for her singing, both here and abroad. Commenting on her recent outing in Cosi Fan Tutte at Faneuil Hall, the Boston Music Intelligencer reported that Ms. Worrell “stole the show,” praising her “crisp voice and hilarious accents” and wrote, “Bethany Worrell has a gorgeous and flexible soprano that revealed a large measure of dramatic intelligence and musical acumen.”

Sean Lair has taken on roles in a number of classic operas and performed as vocalist for many chamber and symphony orchestras. He is also a champion of art song and plays the piano and organ. “He’s a very gifted musician,” says Ms. Braun, “He has a very, very clear tenor voice with beautiful diction.”

The Vineyard program, which Ms. Braun refers to as part of a “mini residency,” will include “English Art Song, operatic arias, a taste of the German tradition and some musical theater,” according to a press release. After the show, the three performers will be giving a master class to a few of the high school’s talented teen singers.

The program is a collaboration between Ms. Braun and Jan Wightman and Abigail Chandler of MVRHS.

Ms. Braun, who splits her time between her homes in Lincoln and Edgartown, is a member of the board of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society, which is supporting and promoting the high school concert. “We’ve been talking about chamber music, about how to better fulfill our educational mission,” says Ms. Braun.

The event is an extension of Ms. Braun’s recently founded initiative “Pianos to Shelters,” which brings donated pianos to shelters, and hosts concerts with musicians from the Boston area.

Ms. Braun and her two singers have performed twice at Boston shelters. Both concerts were well received and, in both cases, inspired some audience participation.

“The first shelter was tiny,” Ms. Braun said. “It was a very stormy night. People were straggling in and about ten people sat down. We played ‘The Vagabond,’ and a man stood up and conducted us perfectly throughout the whole song.”

At the second concert, a larger audience enjoyed the show. “They were very enthusiastic,” Ms. Braun said. “We got them all to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and we heard a gorgeous mezzo voice from the back of the room. It was a woman who was a resident and also worked in the kitchen.”

Encouraged by the reception at the shelters, Ms. Braun hopes to bring her program to schools around the Boston area. The Vineyard performance will mark the first outing in a school setting.

Of the initiative Ms. Braun says, “It means a lot to all three of us. We’re very comfortable doing it, and we get a lot back from it.”

 

 

 

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