The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: This coming Sunday night brings a MUST-HEAR chamber music concert of Schubert and Brahms that is FREE and open to the public. It features faculty members and Collins Fellow at the UW-Madison.

By Jacob Stockinger

This coming Sunday, April 7, at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall there will be an extraordinary concert of Romantic chamber music that features both UW-Madison faculty members and Collins Fellows.

Unfortunately, it is on the same day as a Madison Symphony Orchestra’s afternoon performance. Still, this concert is a MUST-HEAR and I hope you can make it.

The concert will feature UW faculty members violinist David Perry, pianist Christopher Taylor (below top) and cellist Uri Vardi (below bottom, in a photo by Katrin Talbot).

Additionally, the concert will feature Collins Fellows violinist Roxana Pavel (below), violist Elias Goldstein  and cellist Philip Bergman.

The program couldn’t be more appealing. It offers two of the greatest masterpieces of Romantic chamber music: Franz Schubert’s sublime String Quintet in C major (D. 956, or Opus posthumous 163) for two violins, viola and cello; and Johannes Brahms’ dramatic Piano Quintet in F minor,  Opus 34. (The Scherzo movement of the Brahms is in a YouTube video at the bottom.)

Here is some background about the Paul Collins Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowships, thanks to the UW School of Music and its new Concert Manager and Director of Public Relations Kathy Esposito:

The Collins fellowships have been established through the generosity of Paul J. Collins (below) in honor of his mother, Adele Stoppenbach Collins, a 1929 School of Music graduate. Students are nominated by faculty members.

The fellowships are awarded to outstanding graduate performance majors and are determined by a committee of performance faculty.

Collins Awards guarantee two years of support at the master’s level and three years at the doctoral level, contingent upon full-time study and satisfactory progress in the degree program. These awards are sufficient to provide the financial support needed for a single international student to obtain a visa.

And here is more information about Elias Goldstein (below):

He won second prize at the Primrose International Viola Competition in 2011 and recently made his Russian debut with the Moscow Soloists and the New Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under Alexander Slatkovsky. He took second prize at the Yuri Bashmet International Viola Competition, and was also a top prizewinner of the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition in 2010. He has also won top and special prizes at the Andrews University International String Competition, and the Watson Forbes International Viola Competition in 2009.

He holds degrees from DePaul University (M.M.) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (D.M.A.) where he was a Collins Fellow. He has studied with Mark Zinger and with UW-Madison viola teacher and Pro Arte Quartet violist Sally Chisholm. While at the UW, he won Wisconsin Public Radio’s Neale-Silva Young Artists Competition in 2009.

As a soloist with orchestras, Goldstein has appeared with the Moscow Soloists under the direction of Yuri Bashmet, New Moscow Philharmonic, New Mexico Chamber Orchestra, Advent Chamber Orchestra, the Ukrainian Chamber Orchestra, and the DePaul Symphony Orchestra, where he won the annual concerto competition twice.

Goldstein is currently assistant professor of viola at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Here is a link to his website:

http://eliasgoldstein.com/home