Tag Archives: Stephen Feldman

The ASO River Rhapsodies series continues tonight

Posted on by

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra continues the 2019-2020 River Rhapsodies Chamber Music season with Musical Images, Tuesday, January 28th at 7:00 p.m. at the Clinton Presidential Center.

ASO’s Quapaw String Quartet, along with other musicians will perform Golijov’s Tenebrae; Kinan Azmeh’s The Fence, the Rooftop, and the Distant Sea; Paul Reade’s Suite from The Victorian Kitchen Garden; and Elgar’s Violin Sonata in E minor, Op. 82. 

River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Concerts are held in the intimate setting of the Clinton Presidential Center’s Great Hall. A cash bar is open before the concert and at intermission, and patrons are invited to carry drinks into the concert. The Media Sponsor for the River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Series is UA Little Rock Public Radio.

General Admission tickets are $26; active duty military and student tickets are $10 and can be purchased online at www.ArkansasSympohny.org; at the Clinton Center beginning 60 minutes prior to a concert; or by phone at 501-666-1761, ext. 1.

Artists
Quapaw String Quartet
–Meredith Maddox Hicks, violin
–Charlotte Crosmer, violin
–Timothy MacDuff, viola
–David Gerstein, cello
Kiril Laskarov, violin
Andrew Irvin, violin
Kelly Johnson, clarinet
Katherine Williamson, violin
Stephen Feldman, cello
Alisa Coffey, harp
Jason Pennington, piano

Clarinet Quintets Old and New tonight at St. Luke’s Festival of the Senses.

Posted on by

Five musicians from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra will play a free Festival of the Senses concert at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 14, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

Clarinetist Kelly Johnson, violinists Andrew Irvin and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violist Katherine Williamson, and cellist Stephen Feldman will play Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major and contemporary Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh’s “The Fence, the Rooftop, and the Distant Sea.”

The concert, which is free and open to the public, is the fourth in the 2019-20 season of the Festival of the Senses performing arts series sponsored by St. Luke’s and will be followed by a reception in the church’s parish hall.

Written in 1789 and sometimes called the Stadler Quintet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s only completed clarinet quintet is one of his most admired works. His Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581, has four movements: Allegro, Larghetto, Menuetto, and Allegretto con Variazioni.

Image result for the fence the rooftop and the distant sea“The Fence, the Rooftop, and the Distant Sea” by Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh is a work in five movements inspired by memories of his Damascus birthplace in a distant view of the Syrian coastline seen from a rooftop in Beirut. Azmeh has achieved worldwide fame as a clarinetist and composer with a distinctive voice across diverse musical genres.

A graduate of the Julliard School with a doctorate in music from the City University of New York, he has taken his music around the globe as a soloist, composer and improviser.  His album “Uneven Sky” with the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra won the OpusKlassik Award in 2019, and he is a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble, whose 2017 Grammy Award-winning album “Sing Me Home” features Kinan as a clarinetist and composer.

Ravel and Villa-Lobos are on the program for tonight’s Arkansas Symphony River Rhapsodies

Posted on by

Ravel & Villa-LobosThe Arkansas Symphony Orchestra continues the 2019-2020 River Rhapsodies Chamber Music season with Ravel and Villa-Lobos, Tuesday, November 12th at 7:00 p.m. at the Clinton Presidential Center.

ASO’s Rockefeller String Quartet, along with other musicians are performing Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, Ives’ Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano, Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction, and Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5.

River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Concerts are held in the intimate setting of the Clinton Presidential Center’s Great Hall. A cash bar is open before the concert and at intermission, and patrons are invited to carry drinks into the concert. The Media Sponsor for the River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Series is UA Little Rock Public Radio.

General Admission tickets are $26; active duty military and student tickets are $10 and can be purchased online at www.ArkansasSympohny.org; at the Clinton Center beginning 60 minutes prior to a concert; or by phone at 501-666-1761, ext. 1.

Artists
Rockefeller String Quartet
-Trisha McGovern Freeney, violin
-Linnaea Brophy, violin
-Katherine Reynolds, viola
-Jacob Wunsch, cello

David Gerstein, cello
Katherine Williamson, violin
Geoffrey Robson, violin
John Krebs, piano
Casey Buck, cello
Rafael Leon, cello
Daniel Cline, cello
Stephen Feldman, cello
Kristin Smith, cello
Hannah Yeo, cello
Maria Fasciano, soprano

2019-2020 Little Rock Winds season starts tonight

Posted on by

Image result for little rock windsThe Little Rock Winds and conductor Israel Getzov open their 2019-20 Season on Thursday, October 10th at 7:30 p.m. with “Melody and Passion”, a program of gorgeous melodies that exude passion and fire!

And, for the first time, the LR Winds’ will feature a string player as the guest soloist.  Stephen Feldman, cello, will perform Tramonto: Romanza for Cello and Winds, a reflective piece by Luis Serrano Alarcón that artfully employs full wind symphony accompaniment to the romantic cello solo.  Other lush melodies include songs from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby.  Chance’s Incantation and Dance and the finale from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 present passion and fire so hot, the band may need fire-proof tuxes.

7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 10, 2019
Second Presbyterian Church, 600 Pleasant Valley Drive, Little Rock.

Tickets are available online at lrwinds.org and are $15 for adults, $12 for adults 65 and over, and free for students.

Program

Davide Delle Cese         L’Inglesina
John Barnes Chance    Incantation and Dance
Eric Whitacre                 The Seal Lullaby
George Gershwin         Porgy & Bess
Luis Serrano Alarcón   Tramonto: Romanza for Cello and Winds
                                           Stephen Feldman, cello
Dimitri Shostakovich    Symphony #5: Finale
Leonard Bernstein        Slava!

A gifted and enthusiastic communicator in recitals, chamber music, and solo performances, Stephen Feldman’s cello playing has taken him from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Sacramento, California.  Formerly a member of the Fetter and Rivanna String Quartets, he also performed in the Quapaw and Sturgis String Quartets during his six years with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, the Eastman School of Music, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Feldman’s mentors include cellists Steven Doane and Timothy Eddy.  He considers chamber music coach Julius Levine and Baroque specialists Arthur Haas and Paul O’dette also to be significant musical influences.

Israel Getzov has been the Music Director and Conductor of the Little Rock Wind Symphony since 2015.  He also serves as Music Director of the Conway Symphony Orchestra, and previously held the position of Associate Conductor of the Arkansas Symphony and Principal Conductor of the Tianjin Philharmonic, the resident orchestra of the Tianjin Grand Theater.  Mr. Getzov has conducted orchestras throughout the United States and abroad including Abilene Philharmonic, Asheville, Symphony, Cleveland Pops, Monroe Symphony, Skokie Valley Symphony, Shanghai Philharmonic, Symphony of the Mountains, Tianjin Symphony, Zhejiang Symphony Orchestra, Bolivia Classica, University of Taipei Symphony, and the Encuentro Jovenes Musicos Festival in La Paz, Bolivia.

Mr. Getzov started the violin at age 3, and later studied viola, piano and percussion.  An in-demand educator of ensemble techniques, Mr. Getzov holds a tenured professorship at the University of Central Arkansas and has given clinics at many schools in the U.S. and internationally.  A

Little Rock Winds was founded in 1993 to recognize the diverse heritage of the wind band tradition in Arkansas. It is dedicated to providing Arkansas communities live wind band music, including a variety of compositions and transcriptions that inspire audiences, challenge the players, and preserve the wind band tradition. LR Winds is an important outlet for the wind and percussion musicians in the central Arkansas area. The approximately 48 professional and semi-professional musicians are selected by audition and participate for personal development and enjoyment and as a service to the community. Six concerts are performed annually in Little Rock, and the band has performed statewide, from Texarkana to Cherokee Village, Harrison to McGehee.

Concert in memory of longtime ASO violinist Eric Hayward presented tonight

Posted on by

Eric and Christopher Hayward

On Tuesday, September 17, in the first concert of Festival of the Senses’ 2019-20 performing arts season, a string ensemble will play Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Piano Trio in A Minor and a new piano quartet, “The Black Rose,” composed by Little Rock’s Dustin Yoder in memory of Eric Hayward of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (ASO).

The free concert will be held at 7:00 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 4106 JFK Boulevard in North Little Rock, and will feature ASO Concertmaster Kiril Laskarov on violin, Stephen Feldman on cello, May Tsao-Lim on piano, and Eric Hayward’s son, Christopher Hayward, on the viola. A reception will be held in the parish hall following the performance.

“Eric Hayward was our friend and colleague in the Arkansas Symphony and we miss him dearly,” says Kiril Laskarov. “Eric loved chamber music, so we thought the best way to honor his memory was to present this program. We combine one of the greatest chamber music pieces in the literature, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, which was dedicated to another great musician, the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, with the world premiere of a piano quartet entitled ‘The Black Rose,’ which was composed by Eric’s student Dustin Yoder and will feature Chris Hayward, Eric’s son, on the viola.”

Eric Hayward (1954-2018) was an associate concertmaster and principal second violinist with the ASO for 38 years and a founding member of Arkansas’ premier string quartet, the Quapaw String Quartet. Following his death in 2018, the ASO established a principal second violin chair in his memory. He held degrees from Oregon State and Northwestern Universities and studied at the University of Iowa, taught violin and viola privately and in a number of local schools, and played in various concerts at St. Luke’s since before the inception of Festival of the Senses.

Christopher Hayward began his musical education following in his father’s footsteps on violin but later changed to the viola. A 2006 graduate of Little Rock Central High School, he attended Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, and is now married and lives and works in Maumelle. He has played in the Arkansas Youth Orchestra, All-Region Orchestra, All-State Orchestra, and the Missouri All-Collegiate Orchestra.

Dustin Yoder, currently resident composer for WAMA, the music and arts camp of Little Rock’s Wildwood Park for the Arts, is a local musician and former student of Eric Hayward. He was a 2015 violin finalist for the High School Honors Performance Series Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. He teaches private lessons locally, plays part-time in the ASO, has composed scores for a number of short films, and is a self-taught painter.

THE PROGRAM

Piano Trio in A Minor, Opus 50 – Pezzo Elegiaco
  Dedicated to Nikolai Rubinstein (1835−1881)
by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840−1893)

Piano Quartet in C Minor, “The Black Rose”
  Dedicated to Eric Hayward (1954−2018)
by Dustin Yoder (b. 1996)

Piano Trio in A Minor, Opus 50 – A. Tema con Variazioni; B. Finale e Coda
by Tchaikovsky

Chamber Music Concert tonight – Mozart and a Premiere

Posted on by

Image result for mozart clarinet concertoTonight (January 14) at 7pm at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Drew Irvin, Stephen Feldman, and friends will perform the Mozart Clarinet Quintet.

Also on the program is the premier of the work “The Fence, The Rooftop And The Distant Sea”, by Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh for string quartet and clarinet.

Tickets are available at the door for a suggested donation of $15. Students are admitted for free with I.D.

Mozart in A tonight

Posted on by

kiril mozartaThe St. Luke’s Festival of the Senses, our parish’s arts series, is gearing up for new year packed with exciting concerts and arts events. The year kicks off Monday, August 31st at 7pm with Mozart in A, a chamber music program.

The selections will be Mozart pieces composed in A major: Piano Concerto No. 23 and the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29.musicians performing are Tatiana Roitman, piano; Kiril Laskarov, violin; Eric Hayward, violin; Katherine Williamson, viola; and Stephen Feldman, cello.

Festival of the Senses is funded by private donations, the Arkansas Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.