Over to the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, August 1, 2012 for a Chamber Music program featuring the legendary Menahem Pressler, piano as well as the newcomer/wunderkind Jan Lisiecki, also on Piano. The group also features Ray Chen and Itamar Zorman, violins – David Aaron Carpenter, viola – Narek Hakhnazaryan and Torlief Thedéen, cellos.
The program consists of Beethoven’s Trio number 3 – Turina’s Quartet op. 67 and Schumann’s Quartet of Piano and strings op. 47.
Quick rundown on the players:
Jan Lisiecki’s interpretations and technique speak to a maturity beyond his age. At 25, the Canadian performs over a hundred yearly concerts worldwide, and has worked closely with conductors such as Antonio Pappano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Daniel Harding, and Claudio Abbado. At eighteen, Lisiecki became both the youngest ever recipient of Gramophone’s Young Artist Award and received the Leonard Bernstein Award. He was named UNICEF Ambassador to Canada in 2012.
Ray Chen is a Taiwanese-Australian violinist, winner of the 2008 International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition and the 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competition. Since then, he has regularly collaborated with the world’s foremost orchestras and appeared at renowned concert halls. In 2010, Chen graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with a Bachelor of Music, where he studied with Aaron Rosand. He also undertook summer studies at the Encore School for Strings with David Cerone and Robert Lipsett, and at the Aspen Music Festival with Cho-Liang Lin and Paul Kantor on a full tuition fellowship.
Itamar Zorman – is a founding member of the Israeli Chamber Project and has been a member of the Lysander Piano Trio. His first solo CD recording, entitled Portrait,[2] was released by Profil in Europe in August 2014 and in the United States in February 2015. His 2nd CD, Evocation, features violin works by Paul Ben-Haim, in collaboration with pianist Amy Yang, conductor Philippe Bach, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Narek Hakhazarayan was born and raised by his musician parents in Yerevan, Armenia, where he began studying cello at the age of six at the Sayat Nova Music School. When he turned 11, he and his mother moved to Moscow. He was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory in 2006, where he took cello lessons from Alexey Seleznyov and later received scholarships from the Rostropovich Foundation and the Russian Performing Arts Fund. He received the first prize at the 2006 Aram Khachaturian International Competition in Armenia. In 2008, he won both the first prize at the Johansen International Competition for Young String Players and the first prize at the International Auditions of the Young Concert Artists, after which he made his debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall and at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC.
Torlief Thedéen – The Swedish cellist is one of the most distinguished instrumentalists in the Nordic countries and enjoys an international profile as a recitalist, concerto soloist, recording artist and pedagogue. He plays the 1783 Guadagnini cello on loan from the Norwegian Dextra foundation, previously owned by M. Rostropovich.
David Aaron Carpenter: Recipient of the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and First Prize Winner of the Walter E. Naumburg Viola Competition, Carpenter has emerged as one of the world’s leading young artists. He has been acclaimed by Die Welt as “A New Star at the Forefront of Violists”; by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “an overnight-star violist”; and by The Strad Magazine as a violist whose “soulful sound, committed playing and dazzling technique leaves little to desire.” Since making his debut of the Walton Viola Concerto in 2005 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach, David has performed with leading musicians and orchestras in the United States and Europe.
And of course, Menahem Pressler – a German-born Israeli-American pianist and academic teacher, Pressler was known for his work with the Beaux Arts Trio that he co-founded in 1955, playing until its dissolution in 2008, in hundreds of recordings and thousands of concerts. The trio performed in hundreds of recordings and thousands of concerts. They began recording a cycle of the piano trios by Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré. Their repertoire also included contemporary music by Charles Ives and Ned Rorem, among others, and they played ensemble music for six and even eight players. Menahem Pressler taught at Indiana University Bloomington. His playing was described as focused on elegance, delicacy and clarity.
Enjoy the concert – clearly, the audience did.
