Misha Quint, cello and Irina Nuzova, piano in Flights of Fancy

The InterHarmony® International Music Festival invites audiences to the next installment of its New York Concert Series, at 8 pm on January 23, 2016, at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Festival Founder, cellist Misha Quint and pianist Irina Nuzova will present a program of works which push the limits of the cello repertoire, questioning the boundaries between instruments, genres, and cultures. Tickets are $35, and can be purchased by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, at the Carnegie Hall box office located at West 57th and Seventh Avenue, or online at www.carnegiehall.org.

About the Program: FLIGHTS OF FANCY

Classical music is anything but static. With time, technique and, above all, inspiration, what was once unimaginable becomes a reality on stage. Join Quint and Nuzova as they show how the possibilities of cello music have expanded by incorporating other repertoires and cultures in a search for beauty, wherever it might be. The program features pieces originally written for other instruments (like Schnittke\'s Suite in an Old Style and the Franck Sonata), music from ballets and operas (Prokofiev\'s Cinderella and Rimsky-Korsakov\'s Flight of the Bumblebee), and works of cultural cross-pollination (Rodion Shchedrin\'s Russian tango, In the Style of Albéniz, and Bruch\'s Kol Nidrei, which enriched the Romantic idiom with Jewish melodies). Go to www.interharmony.com/interharmony-concert-series for more about artists and music.

The Music

Davidov’s Romance sans Paroles is a work of pure lyricism, which stakes the cello\'s claim to the territory of the human voice itself. Franck’s Sonata in A Major, written for the violin, is an even greater success on the cello, thanks to its dramatic, contrasting colors. Schnittke\'s Suite in the Old Style, an elegant collection of pastoral, almost Baroque dances, lets only a few dark hints escape its innocent mask. In Bruch\'s Kol Nidrei, the cello imitates the penitential sigh of a hazzan chanting in the synagogue. In the Style of Albéniz, Shchedrin creates “a kind of a ‘tangissimo,’” cooking Albéniz\'s music down into something passionate, free and wild. Prokofiev’s arrangement of a duet from his popular ballet Cinderella transforms its emotional intimacy into a dance between musicians. Rimsky-Korsakov\'s Flight of the Bumblebee, vividly realistic and stunningly difficult, has become practically synonymous with virtuosity.