Wednesday, March 19, 2025
19.00h
Sala Oriol Bohigas – Ateneu Barcelonès
Carrer de la Canuda, 6, Barcelona
American classical music represents not only a diversity of styles but a diversity of identities, and musicians from all over the world who make the United States their home in the last century have enjoyed a unique integration of academia and philosophy with composition and performance.
One of the least explicitly stated questions that has been repeatedly explored is the diverse relationships people can have to music, rather than just the compositional intent in the musical work.
This program highlights this variety of experiences through voice (literally and figuratively) in humorous, poetic, and virtuosic contexts to celebrate American composer-performer-philosophers of the last 100 years
Concert Program
Marc Migó: Tres romances 1. Romança amorosa |
Sarah Gibson: You are still here for solo violin |
Matthew Aucoin: Poem, Op. 1 for solo violin and voice |
Michelle Ross: Vignettes 1. Toujours Pour la Première Fois |
Leonard Bernstein: A Cycle of Five Kid Songs 1. My Name is Barbara |
Charles Ives: Violin Sonata No. 2 1. Autumn |
Albert Markov: “Porgy” Rhapsody |
Personnel
Max Tan, violinist
Taiwanese-American violinist Max Tan has been praised as “eloquent” (New York Times) and “warmly rhapsodic” (Boston Globe) for “rhetorical playing that transcends the barlines” (Wieniawski Gazette). Forging a varied career as performer and educator, he has performed internationally on some of the world’s most venerable stages, soloing with the Chamber Orchestra of Wallonia, Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio, Hudson Valley Philharmonic, The Juilliard Orchestra, amongst others. His performances have been broadcasted on WQXR (New York), WFMT (Chicago), WSMR (Sarasota), Musiq3 (Belgium), Polish Radio and Radio Poznan (Poland).
Recipient of the 2023 Gershen Cohen Violin Award, Dr. Tan made his Carnegie Hall recital debut with pianist Marisa Gupta on April 3, 2024. Notable festival appearances include La Jolla Summerfest, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, YellowBarn, Chelsea Music Festival, and Prussia Cove. He has given the premieres of works by important living composers in North America and Asia, including Sur la corde raide by French composer Jean-Frederic Neuberger, Phylogenie by Japanese composer Misato Mochizuki, Night Scenery by Chinese composer Sang Tong, and chamber works by Catalan composer Marc Migó. His writings about music have appeared in The Juilliard Journal in New York and L’education musicale in France, as well as Juilliard School Library Manuscript Treasures: By and for Performers published by Scala. Dr. Tan’s dissertation research centers on the provenance of unpublished arrangements of Chausson’s Poème and other notable works for violin, piano, and organ by Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, the first recordings of which will be released in the coming months. His performances of these newly uncovered works have taken place in New York and Sarasota, Florida. In October 2023, he gave a lecture-performance on Ysaÿe’s arrangement of Chausson’s Poème at the Tianjin Juilliard School’s library opening, and also taught seminars on performance practice to students at Tianjin Juilliard and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
A Harvard alumnus and current doctoral candidate at Juilliard, Mr. Tan is founder and artistic director of Soundbox Ventures, which launched the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program, the 2024 Suncoast Composer Festival, as well as the Listen Hear Salon Concerts series. He is concertmaster of Opera Philadelphia and assistant faculty of violin and chamber music at Juilliard’s Pre-College, in addition to maintaining his private studio. His mentors at Juilliard include Catherine Cho, Donald Weilerstein, and Itzhak Perlman.
Paul Rivinius, pianist
Pianist Paul Rivinius, born in 1970, received his first piano lessons at the age of five. His teachers were first Gustaf Grosch in Munich, later Alexander Sellier, Walter Blankenheim and Nerine Barrett at the Musikhochschule in Saarbrücken.
After graduating from high school, he also studied horn with Marie-Luise Neunecker at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule and continued his piano studies with Raymund Havenith. In 1994 he was accepted into Gerhard Oppitz’s master class at the Musikhochschule in Munich, which he completed with honours in 1998. Paul Rivinius was for a long-time member of the Bundesjugendorchester and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.
As a chamber musician, he won several prizes with the Clemente Trio, founded in 1986, for example at the renowned ARD Music Competition in Munich in 1998 and subsequently performed as the “Rising Star” ensemble in the world’s ten most important concert halls, including Carnegie Hall in New York and Wigmore Hall in London.
Paul Rivinius also plays in the Rivinius Piano Quartet together with his brothers Benjamin, Gustav and Siegfried.
Since 2004 he has also been pianist of the Mozart Piano Quartet, which has gained international reputation through extensive tours in North and South America and Asia.
In 2018 the Mozart Piano Quartet received the “Opus Klassik” for the recording of Georg Hendrik Witte’s Piano Quartet for MDG Dabringhaus & Grimm.
Paul Rivinius was part of numerous radio and CD productions with cellists Julian Steckel, Johannes Moser and with the Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling to name a few.
Paul Rivinius taught for many years as professor of chamber music at the “Hanns Eisler” Academy of Music in Berlin and lives now in Munich.
Melissa Gregory, mezzo-soprano
Australian mezzo-soprano Melissa Gregory studied at the RNCM and the Queensland Conservatorium. A former Welsh National Opera Associate Artist, Melissa is current holder of the prestigious Lady Fairfax La Scala Opera Award and has spent part of her 24/25 season at La Scala, Milan (where she covered both Meg Page Falstaff and Olga Eugene Onegin).
Summer 2025 sees a return to Glyndebourne Festival Opera, as cover Varvara Kát’ya Kabanová; her autumn plans include Dorabella Cosi fan tutte with Opera Project/Tobacco Factory Theatre in the UK.
Other operatic engagements include Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro (RNCM), Der Komponist and Dryade in R. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (RNCM and LGNOS), Fox Goldenmane in Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen (RNCM), Orlofsky in Die Flederamus (Lyric Opera Studio Weimar), Hansel in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, Dritte Dame in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Florence Pike in Britten’s Albert Herring (Queensland Conservatorium) and Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Musica Antiqua Collegii).
On the concert platform, Melissa recently performed in a London Handel Festival Finalists Recital at the Charterhouse in the Barbican. She has also performed the mezzo-soprano solos in the Verdi Requiem as part of the Noosa Chorale’s Silver Anniversary Year Celebration, broadcast on radio in Australia and overseas. Other highlights include Beethoven’s 9th Symphony QCGU), J.S Bach’s Magnificat, Schubert Magnificat in C D486, Beethoven Mass in C Op.8 and Mozart’s Requiem (Queensland Choir).
Additionally, Melissa performed as a soloist in the critically-acclaimed premiere of Opera Queensland’s Mozart Airborne in collaboration with Expressions Dance Company, nominated for two Helpmann awards including Best Dance Production.
