Press Releases

Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) Junior/Senior Concert series presents keyboard virtuosos Micah McLaurin and Adam Golka in works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, June 1, 2019, at 3:00 P.M.

The Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF), in this year’s edition of its Junior/Senior Concert series, will offer two multi-prizewinning pianists – a recently rising star, Micah McLaurin, and a longer-established precursor, Adam Golka – in joint recital at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, June 1, at 3:00 P.M. Separately and together, they will offer luxuriant fare by Russian masters of the Late Romantic period – Sergei Rachmaninoff, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner.

This Junior/Senior Concert is dedicated to the memory of Robert Alan Behren (1929-2018), distinguished polymath in U.S. business, law and the arts, member of MEF’s board of directors from 1987 and its president since 1992.

MEF’s concerts are not fundraisers: all who play in them receive MEF performance grants. The Junior/Senior Concerts were initiated in 2002 by Marie M. Ashdown, MEF’s executive director since 1984, to present rising young performers of professional status (i.e., already under management) alongside colleagues of recent but earlier vintage. The latter, some of whom may also be teachers, affirm by their collegiality a vital continuity of growth within the ranks of musicians. 

Micah McLaurin, this year’s “Junior” performer, a winner of the 2016 Gilmore Young Artist Award, opens MEF’s June 1 program with five Rachmaninoff pieces, including three preludes, followed by Mily Balakirev’s legendary virtuosic “Oriental Fantasy” Islamey. His “Senior” fellow pianist Adam Golka, already a veteran of several MEF concerts, then offers one of Rachmaninoff’s Musical Moments, plus Scriabin’s Sonata No. 3. The program concludes with music for two pianos – Medtner’s brisk, inventive Russian Round Dance No.1, followed by Rachmaninoff’s atmospheric Symphonic Dances. Dating from the 1940s, these are late works of both pianist composers, whose culture and style evoke the golden age of their past colleagues Liszt, Balakirev, Anton Rubinstein and Scriabin.

— Press release written by John W. Freeman, 

Program and Publicity

Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) presents keyboard virtuosos Orion Weiss and Adam Golka in works by Brahms and in Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals — Grand Zoological Fantasy with assisting artists at Alice Tully Hall, Sunday, June 3, 2018, at 3:00 P.M.

This year’s first event in MEF’s Junior/Senior Concert series will highlight two facets of late nineteenth-century Romanticism – the warm keyboard personality of Johannes Brahms and the elegant wit of Camille Saint-Saëns, whose The Carnival of the Animals – Grand Zoological Fantasy, with assisting artists, will close the program.

Works for both solo and four-hands piano will form the Brahms portion of the event, with Orion Weiss presenting the Hamburg master’s Variations on a Theme by Schumann, Op. 9. Adam Golka will follow with selections from Opp. 76, 117, 118 and 119 (including the famous A-major Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2), widening the arc from Brahms’ youth to his maturity. Then the two artists will join forces in a group of his Hungarian dances for piano, four hands.

These dances clear the path for The Carnival of the Animals – Grand Zoological Fantasy, polyglot musical entertainment aimed by Saint-Saëns at spoofing the zoo of the music world – composers, performers and critics alike. The work’s novel group of instruments will be manned by assisting artists Alexi Kenney (violin 1), Ben Russell (violin 2), Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu (viola), Nicholas Canellakis (cello), Sam Suggs (double bass), Joanna Wu (flute), Romie de Guise-Langlois (clarinet) and Sean Ritenauer (percussion). Ogden Nash’s short mid-twentieth-century verses for the piece will be recited from the piano by Orion Weiss during its performance.

— Press release written by John W. Freeman, 

Program and Publicity

Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) Presents Franz Liszt: Holy and Infernal Genius, with pianists Adam Golka and Orion Weiss and mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein, at Alice Tully Hall, Sunday, April 30, 2017, at 3:00 P.M. 

This spring’s Junior/Senior Concert by Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) will be a tribute to Franz Liszt in all his controversial diversity as showman, teacher, musical thinker and forward-looking visionary. One of the superstar pianists of his era, Liszt was compared to violinist Niccolo Paganini as seeming to be in league with the devil. Yet, he parlayed his fame into a golden opportunity to instruct, support and inspire an oncoming generation of fellow artists. Nowadays he is judged a pioneer in the growth of modern music.

Both pianists who conceived of this spring’s Liszt concert are alumni of earlier events sponsored by MEF – Adam Golka in a June 2015 solo recital, Orion Weiss in an October 2016 program of rarely heard chamber music. On April 30 this year, in Liszt’s honor, they will perform solo works as well as the composer’s Reminiscences de Don Juan for two pianos. To represent Liszt’s still largely unfamiliar song repertory, the pianists are joined by gifted young mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein. Born in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Ms. Eberwein is a Curtis Institute graduate who recently joined the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio, with which she tours this spring. 

— Press release by John W. Freeman, 

Program and Publicity

Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) Presents Israeli Pianist Roman Rabinovich in Recital, at Alice Tully Hall, Saturday, May 14, 2016, at 3:00 P.M.

This spring’s Junior/Senior Concert presentation by Musicians Emergency Fund (MEF) will mark the Alice Tully Hall debut recital of the brilliant young Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich, winner of the 12th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition.

Born in 1985 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the artist began piano studies at age six and immigrated with his parents in 1994 to Israel, where he was enrolled at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and made his solo debut with the Israel Philharmonic at age ten. Since then, his series of concerto performances has expanded to include most of Israel’s major orchestras, and many orchestras in Europe and the U.S. as well.

Nowadays living in New York, Rabinovich moved to the U.S. to study at the Curtis Institute with Seymour Lipkin and earn his master’s degree at Juilliard, where he worked with Robert McDonald. In addition to keeping up his concerto appearances with various U.S. orchestras and a 2014 Haifa Orchestra tour of 28 U.S. cities, Rabinovich has broadened his horizons with numerous solo recitals and chamber music concerts. In 2015 he joined Liza Ferschtman in Beethoven’s complete violin/piano sonatas and for the 2016-17 season he is embarking on a cycle of Haydn’s complete piano sonatas.

His debut CD, Ballets Russes, released by Orchid Classics, earned the Classical Recording Foundation’s 2013 Artist of the Year award. This virtuosic disc represents a specialty of his repertory, keyboard transcriptions of ballet scores – Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Stravinsky’s Petrushka (a feature of his MEF recital program), and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Another angle of his multifaceted talent is revealed by his drawing and painting, which enable him to interpret visually some of the music he performs.

The Rabinovich recital presented by MEF at Alice Tully Hall on May 14 opens with Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat, Hob. XVI:49, followed by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 28 in A, Op. 101. The program continues with Schumann’s Papillons, Op. 2, then a premiere of one of the pianist’s own compositions, and finally the spectacular piano version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

— Press release written by John W. Freeman, 

Program and Publicity