On Saturday, October 7, 2017, Music at the Institute opened its 29th Season. Works by Beethoven, Barvinsky, and Brahms performed by violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv, cellist Darrett Adkins and pianist Jerome Lowenthal.
Violinist SOLOMIYA IVAKHIV has quickly earned a reputation for performing with “distinctive charm and subtle profundity” (Daily Freeman, New York) and a “crystal clear and noble sound” (Culture and Life, Ukraine). She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, CBC Glenn Gould Studio, Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, and the Tchaikovsky Hall in Kyiv, in addition to making solo appearances with the Istanbul State Symphony, Charleston Symphony, Henderson Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hunan Symphony Orchestra in China. She has premiered numerous new works for violin by composers Eli Marshall, David Ludwig, John B. Hedges, Bohdan Kryvopust, Yevhen Stankovych, and Oleksandr Shchetynsky. Ms. Ivakhiv has been featured at many prestigious chamber music festivals, including Tanglewood, The Embassy Series, Ottawa Chamberfest, New- port Music Festival, Nevada Chamber Music Fest, Bach Festival of Philadelphia, The Banff Centre and Ottawa Chamber Fest (Canada); Musique de Chambre à Giverny (France), Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music (England), Kammermusik Bodensee (Switzerland); AlpenKammerMusik (Austria), Modern Music “Contrasts” and KyivFest (Ukraine). A dedicated educator, she has conducted master classes and chamber music coachings at Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania State, SUNY-Fredonia Universities, Boston Conservatory, Curtis SummerFest, Bard College Prep, Guangzhou and Hunan Conservatories in China. Her latest album, Ukraine–Journey To Freedom with pianist Angelina Gadeliya, released on Labor Records with NAXOS of America, has been featured among the top 4 new classical albums on iTunes. Ms. Ivakhiv has been the Artistic Director of the “Music at the Institute” (MATI) Concert Series in New York City for seven years, where she also regularly appears as a performer. She is currently Assistant Professor of Violin and Viola and Head of Strings at the University of Connecticut and Professor of Violin at the Longy School of Music. Ms. Ivakhiv graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied with Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, and the late Rafael Druian. During this time she was concertmaster of both Curtis and Tanglewood Center Symphony Orchestras. Ms. Ivakhiv holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stony Brook University where her principal teachers were Philip Setzer and Pamela Frank.
Performances by cellist DARRETT ADKINS have been called “heroic,” “stunning,” “intensely involving” (New York Times) and “fiery” (Boston Globe). This “adventurous champion of contemporary music” (Strings Magazine) has given many important first performances of new works, including the first New York performance and recording of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XIV (Naxos), the first American performance of Franco Donatoni’s concerto Le Ruisseau sur l’escalier with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the world premiere of Andrew Mead’s Cello Concerto with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and during his tenure with the Flux Quartet, the first complete performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, lasting six continuous hours (later recorded and released by Mode Records). He played the first American performance of Rolf Wallin’s concerto Grund at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and premiered Jeffrey Mumford’s concerto (which was written for and dedicated to him) with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. His forthcoming CD will feature recordings of newly commissioned concertos by Philip Cashian and Su Lian Tan, as well the concerto for cello and 9 Instruments by Richard Wernick. Mr. Adkins’s Aspen debut was made with James Conlon conducting Pierre Boulez’s Messagesquisse on just three days’ notice. He was a guest of the Juilliard String Quartet on their recording of Jay Greenberg’s String Quintet (Sony Masterworks), and he later gave the first concert performance with the Chiara Quartet. His recording of duos by Ravel, Kodaly and Sessions on Engine Company Records reached the Amazon.com top 10 and was number one on Emusic.com for several weeks. In 2011, he joined the Lions Gate Trio, which enjoys a residency at the Hartt School and performs throughout the U.S. and Europe. They recently released a CD of trios by Ravel, Ives, and Rebecca Clarke. Mr. Adkins serves on the cello and chamber music faculties of the Juilliard School, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the Aspen Music Festival and School.
JEROME LOWENTHAL, born in 1932, continues to fascinate audiences, who find in his playing a youthful intensity and an eloquence born of life-experience. He is a virtuoso of the fingers and the emotions, “a pianist in the grand manner,” as The New York Times called him. Mr. Lowenthal studied in his native Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with Alfred Cortot, meanwhile traveling annually to Los Angeles for coachings with Artur Rubinstein. After winning prizes in three international competitions (Bolzano, Darmstadt, and Brussels) he moved to Jerusalem, where, for three years he played, taught, and lectured. Returning to America, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic playing Bartok’s Concerto No. 2 in 1963. Since then, he has performed more or less everywhere, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors with whom he has appeared as soloist include Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and Slatkin, as well as such giants of the past as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux, and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir (his late wife), Carmel Lowenthal (his daughter), and Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark, Avalon, and Shanghai Quartets. This season he has performed Chopin in Beijing, Scriabin in Moscow, and Clementi and Poulenc in New York. He has recently recorded the complete Annees de Pelerinage of Liszt. His other recordings include concerti by Tchaikovsky and Liszt, solo works by Sinding and Bartok, opera paraphrases by Liszt and Busoni, and chamber music by Arensky and Taneyev. Teaching, too, is an important part of Mr. Lowenthal’s musical life. For twenty-six years at the Juilliard School and for forty-seven summers at the Music Academy of the West, he has worked with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that perspective allows.
Ukrainian Institute of America 