Mirages et Passages: Misha Quint, cello; Irina Nuzova, piano

Cellist Misha Quint Breaks Boundaries Between Instruments, Genres, and Cultures in Mirages et Passages at
New InterHarmony® Series Opening at
Palm Beaches Theatre on
January 30 at 7PM

InterHarmony Palm Beach Series: Misha Quint, cello

InterHarmony® International Music Festival opens a new concert series in the most exciting location of Palm Beach, Florida area. The inaugural concert will feature Founder and Music Director Misha Quint in a cello recital on January 30, 2016 at 7PM at Palm Beaches Theatre. The pianist for the evening will be Irina Nuzova. They will present a program of music that pushes the limits of the cello repertoire, questioning the boundaries between instruments, genres and cultures. The InterHarmony Palm Beach Series continues on March 13th, with a chamber music concert featuring pearls of the piano trio repertoire with Misha Quint (cello), with special guests Andrzej Grabiec (violin) and Gerald Robbins (piano). For tickets call the box office at 561-362-0003 or order online with credit card at theatre.pbifilmfest.org.

About InterHarmony® International Music Festival

In existence for almost 2 decades, InterHarmony has become one of the important festivals worldwide, and the fastest growing. Anchored in Tuscany, Italy and Bavaria, Germany each summer, the festival boasts a new Outstanding Guest Artist Series that features stars such as Alfred Brendel and Vadim Repin. Now, fresh from a run at the InterHarmony Concert Series at Carnegie Hall in New York, IIMF’s founder and cellist Misha Quint brings some of the best of these programs with him to Palm Beach. For more information about InterHarmony® International Music Festival, please visit www.interharmony.com/florida.

About the Program: Mirages et Passages

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 January 30 concert 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 “Adagio” from Cinderella and Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee), and works of cultural cross-pollination (Shchedrin's Russian tango, "In the Style of Albéniz," and Bruch's Kol Nidrei, which enriched the Romantic idiom with Jewish melodies). On March 13th, he returns with Grabiec and Robbins to offer a stormy program of “Quintessential Trios” by Dvořák, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich in a Sunday matinee concert at 5pm.

The Music

One of the 19th century's most important cellists, Karl Davidov contributed much to the technical wizardry of the Russian school. But his Romance sans Paroles is a work of pure lyricism, an unabashedly romantic melody that stakes the cello's claim to the territory of the human voice itself.

It is unclear what instrument César Franck originally intended for his Sonata in A major; he decided only when he needed a wedding present for his friend, the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Still, this sonata, which secured Franck's reputation among audiences and critics, is an even greater success on the cello, due to the drama and contrasting colors of the cello's high and low registers.

Alfred Schnittke's Suite in the Old Style is an elegant collection of five pastoral dance movements, like the Baroque suites of Handel and Bach. It begins with winning naïveté, offering the audience only the slightest of glimpses behind its innocent mask before dissolving into unperturbed beauty again.

In Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei, the cello imitates the rhapsodic voice of a hazzan, chanting the liturgy in the synagogue, a penitential sigh. A German romantic composer from a Lutheran background, Bruch became friends with Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, the head cantor of Berlin, whose artistry inspired him to incorporate Jewish themes into his own work.

Rodion Shchedrin's In the Style of Albéniz is a tribute to Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, who, like Shchedrin, synthesized folk traditions with classical music. Without ever explicitly quoting Albéniz, Shchedrin creates “a kind of a ‘tangissimo,’” cooking Albéniz's music down to its very essence and amplifying its inherent dramatic into something passionate, free and wild.

Prokofiev excerpted a duet from his popular ballet Cinderella and arranged it for the cellist Alexander Stogorsky. Moving throughout the instrument's range with a variety of textures, from stormy double stops to airy wisps of melody, the emotional intimacy of the duet is transferred to the musicians.

Rimsky-Korsakov's fairy-tale opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan may now be largely forgotten, but The Flight of the Bumblebee from its third act is instantly recognizable. Its frantic mirages et passages, vividly realistic and stunningly difficult, have become practically synonymous with virtuosity.

Artist Bios

Cellist MISHA QUINT made his orchestral debut at the age of 13 after winning first place in the Boccherini Competition in St. Petersburg. Some of the celebrated orchestras that Quint has performed with include: Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional do Brasilia, The Metropolitan Symphony, New York Chamber Orchestra, The National Irish Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, London Soloists Chamber Orchestra at Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Leningrad State Orchestra, Orchestra of Classical and Contemporary Music and the Symphony Orchestras of Latvia and Georgia. Quint has worked with an equally illustrious group of conductors, including Maxim Shostakovich, Paul Lustig Dunkel, Colman Pearce, Sidney Harth, Ravil Martinov, Camilla Kolchinsky, Yaacov Bergman, Franz Anton Krager and Ira Levin, and premiered works of the most outstanding composers of today including Sophie Goubadalina, Robert Sirota, Steven Gerber, Thomas Fortmann, Nathan Davis, and Alfred Schnitke. Quint is an active chamber musician and has performed with such artists as Nikolai Znaider, Bela Davidovich, Bruno Canino, Sherban Lupu, Andrzej Grabiec, Yuri Gandelsman, Boris Kushnir, and Mikhail Kopelman. Quint started founding music festivals in Europe in 1997 with the creation of The International Cello Festival in Blonay, Switzerland, followed by the Soesterberg International Music Festival in Holland in 1998. Quint established the InterHarmony Music Festival in Geneva, Switzerland in 2000, and has since moved iterations of the festival to San Francisco, The Berkshires in Massachusetts, Schwarzwald, Germany, Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany, and Tuscany, Italy, as well as the InterHarmony Concert Series at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Quint is currently on the faculty of the Preparatory Division at Mannes College The New School for Music, in Manhattan. Quint will release a new recording on the Blue Griffin Label called "Matryoshka Blues" in January 2016. www.mishaquintcello.com

Winner of numerous international prizes and awards, pianist IRINA NUZOVA has appeared in recital as a soloist and as a chamber musician in the United States, Europe, and South America. In Europe she performed at the Amici della Musica concert series in Florence, at the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, the Moscow Conservatory, Germany, Romania, and in the Netherlands, and In the USA at the Phillips Collection and National Gallery in Washington D.C., Weill Recital Hall in New York, Gardner Museum in Boston, Music in the Parks Series in St.Paul. Ms. Nuzova has appeared in live radio interviews and live broadcasts on Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC radio stations. A native of Moscow, Russia, Ms. Nuzova studied at the Gnessin Academy of Music under the guidance of Alexander Satz before moving to the United States. Ms. Nuzova holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. She earned her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the Hartt School of Music. A devoted teacher, Ms. Nuzova was invited to join the Piano Faculty at the Special School of America in 2013, where she teaches individual students and chamber music. Ms. Nuzova was part of a Duo-in-Residence at the Music Institute of Chicago with the cellist Wendy Warner. Ms. Nuzova gave Master Classes at the Schwob School of Music in Columbus, GA and at the Music Institute of Chicago and serves regularly as a jury panelist at piano competitions around the USA. During the summer, Ms. Nuzova teaches at the InterHarmony International Music Festival in Italy. She is a member of the Camerata Phillips, the chamber ensemble in residence of the Phillips Collection Gallery in Washington DC. www.irinanuzova.com

Where To Go

Tickets are $40 and can be purchased by calling the box office at 561-362-0003 of Palm Beaches Theatre or online at theatre.pbifilmfest.org. The Palm Beaches Theatre is located at no.