This season's artists:

The biographies of the artists for the Spring season:

Sunday, April 22 at 4:00 P.M.
To open our Spring 2012 season, two of America’s greatest musical couples collaborate with a truly delightful program. Legendary pianist Leon Fleisher with Katherine Jacobson, his wife and duo partner, and iconic violinist Pamela Frank with violinist Andy Simionescu, her husband and Performers of Westchester Artistic Director. Their program includes what is perhaps the most popular of Handel’s six violin Sonatas, paired with Schubert’s G minor sonata, which he composed at age 16. To compliment these chamber works, Mr. Fleisher and Ms. Jacobson perform two supreme masterpieces for piano four hands: Schubert’s sublimely beautiful F minor fantasy, and Brahms’ irresistible “love song” waltzes which appropriately reflect their Schubertian heritage.


Sunday, May 6 at 4:00 P.M.
Long-time Performers of Westchester favorites, The Raphael Trio, with our equally favorite violinist Pamela Frank, and a prodigious young violist, Ayane Koasa, winner of the prestigious Primrose Competition in 2011. Their program opens with an early work by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, best known as a composer of operas, whose inspired chamber music went unrecognized until the late 20th century. Then, two wonderful creations of Antonin Dvořák: the charming and affecting miniatures for an unusual ensemble of two violins and viola, and the A Major piano quartet, one of the greatest works in that medium, inspired by Czech folk music, with the second movement Dumka, the same form as the famed Dumky trio, and the third movement folk dance Furiant.


Sunday, May 13 at 4:00 P.M.
The American String Quartet, another Performers of Westchester favorite, winners of the coveted Naumberg Chamber Music Award, celebrates its 36th anniversary this season. In addition to its extensive performing schedule, the quartet serves as ensemble-in-residence at New York’s Manhattan School of Music. Their program opens with Haydn’s G Major quartet. Composed when he was 56, it embodies the abundant virtues of his mature works. They continue with Dvořák’s memorable E-flat Major quartet, nicknamed the “Slavonic” for its wealth of folk inspired song and dance forms, and close with Beethoven’s F Major quartet, the first of three quartets dedicated to Prince Andreas Razumovsky, with a popular Russian tune dominating the final movement to please its aristocratic commissioner, and chamber music lovers ever since.


Sunday, May 20 at 4:00 P.M.
The dynamic young piano trio, The Electra Ensemble makes an encore performance following their enthusiastically received Performers of Westchester debut in spring, 2010, this time with a new, and we are confident, excellent pianist, Anastasia Seifetdinova. Their attractively varied program offers three classics of the piano trio repertoire, old and new. Ravel’s piano trio, composed in 1914 on the eve of World War I, is considered one of the modern masterpieces of the medium. Paul Schoenfield, an American composer living is Israel, became an internationally recognized figure mainly through the renowned Eroica Trio’s performances of his Café Music, a work that synthesizes the classical and popular while requiring virtuosic technical skills. Brahms’ towering B Major Trio was composed in 1854, then remarkably, radically revised by the composer 37 years later, in 1891 in the version generally performed today.


Sunday, June 3 at 4:00 P.M.
For the season’s final concert, Andy Simionescu has organized a quartet of superb musicians, including: Nokuthula Ngwenyama, one of America’s finest violists well known and admired by our regular audience members; Matt Haimovitz, the master cellist from Montreal and revered veteran of countless Performers of Westchester concerts, and distinguished violinist Cyrus Beloukhim, Andy’s colleague in the New York City Ballet Orchestra, making his Performers of Westchester debut. Their program opens with the fourth of the six quartets in Haydn’s opus 20, the work that earned him the title “the father of the string quartet.” It continues with Gideon Klein’s string trio, his last work, composed in 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, shortly before his removal to Auschwitz, and concludes with Beethoven’s F minor string quartet. Called the “serioso,” it lives up to its name, and is considered to represent the composer’s reaction to Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna in 1810.