Saint-Saëns, Bonis, Poulenc, and Spohr
Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 6:30 & 9:00 pm
Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio at CMS
1 hour, no intermission
Program
Camille Saint-Saëns
(1835–1921)Romance for Horn and Piano in E major, Op. 67
(1862)Mélanie Bonis
(1858–1937)Sonata for Flute and Piano
(1904)Francis Poulenc
(1899–1963)Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon
(1922, rev. 1945)Louis Spohr
(1784–1859)Quintet for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano, Op. 52
(1820)
Gilles Vonsattel
Tara Helen O'Connor
David Shifrin
Marc Goldberg
Radovan Vlatković
Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel boasts remarkable versatility and artistic originality. Winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the 2016 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award, and top prizes in the Naumburg and Geneva competitions, he has graced prestigious stages worldwide, enthralling audiences with recitals and chamber performances, and collaborating with renowned orchestras including the Munich Philharmonic and the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies. As a champion of new music, he has premiered compositions by celebrated composers such as Jörg Widmann, Heinz Holliger, Anthony Cheung, and George Benjamin. He is an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program and has earned degrees from Columbia University and the Juilliard School. Today, Vonsattel shares his passion for music as a Professor of Piano at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Tara Helen O’Connor, recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a two-time Grammy nominee, was the first wind player to participate in CMS’s Bowers Program. A regular performer at major music festivals around the country, she is also the Co-Artistic Director of the Music from Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico, the Artistic Director of the Essex Winter Series, a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, and a founding member of the Naumburg Award–winning New Millennium Ensemble. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings, and Bridge Records, and can be heard on numerous film and television soundtracks. She has premiered hundreds of new works and has collaborated with the Orion, St. Lawrence, and Emerson String Quartets. A Wm. S. Haynes flute artist, O’Connor is on faculty at Yale School of Music. Additionally, she teaches at Bard College and the Manhattan School of Music.
A Yale University faculty member since 1987, clarinetist David Shifrin is artistic director of Yale’s Chamber Music Society and the Yale in New York concert series. He has performed with CMS since 1982 and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004, inaugurating CMS’s Bowers Program and the annual Brandenburg Concertos concerts. He was the artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest from 1981 to 2020. Winner of the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1987) and the Avery Fisher Prize (2000), he has held principal clarinet positions in numerous orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra and the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. As soloist, Shifrin has performed recitals at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Library of Congress. Notable concerto performances include the Philadelphia and Minnesota orchestras; the Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Milwaukee, and Denver symphonies; as well as orchestras in China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Shifrin performs on clarinets made by Morrie Backun in Vancouver, Canada, and Légère synthetic reeds.
A member of the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble and New York Woodwind Quintet, Marc Goldberg is principal bassoonist of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Ballet Theater, the Saito Kinen Orchestra, and the NYC Opera. Previously the associate principal bassoonist of the New York Philharmonic, he has also been a frequent guest of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, touring with these ensembles across four continents and joining them on numerous recordings. A long-time season artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he has been a guest of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Brentano Quartet, Music@Menlo, Musicians from Marlboro, and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Band. Goldberg is on the faculty of the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, Mannes College, New England Conservatory, the Hartt School, and the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
Radovan Vlatković has performed extensively around the globe and popularized the horn as a recording artist and teacher. He is the winner of numerous competitions, including the Premio Ancona in 1979 and the ARD Competition in 1983. He has premiered works by Elliott Carter, Sofia Gubaidulina, Heinz Holliger, and several Croatian composers; he premiered Penderecki's horn concerto, Winterreise, in Bremen in 2008 with the composer as conductor. As a chamber musician, he has performed at Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus, Svyatoslav Richter's December Evenings in Moscow, and András Schiff's Mondsee, as well as the Marlboro Festival, Prussia Cove, and the Casals Festival. He has appeared as soloist with many orchestras, such as the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Mozarteum Orchestra, Santa Cecilia Orchestra Rome, Melbourne Orchestra, the NHK Orchestra in Tokyo, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The recipient of several German Record Critics’ Awards, he has recorded Mozart and Strauss concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra and Jeffrey Tate for EMI, two-horn concertos by Leopold Mozart and Johann Friedrich Fasch with Hermann Baumann and Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, and the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings with the Oriol Ensemble in Berlin. Vlatkovic is on the faculty of the Mozarteum Salzburg, Hochschule Zürich, and holds the Canón horn chair at the Queen Sofia School in Madrid. He recently became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music.