Season Finale!

Join us Friday, 17 May 2019 for the Jamestown Concert Association's Season Finale - Ensemble Schumann!  The Program includes selections from Heinrich von Herzongenberg, Max Bruch, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Robert Schumann.  These pieces are performed by a dazzling, colorful trio of soloists, the members of Ensemble Schumann – Thomas Gallant, Oboe, Steve Larson, Viola, and Sally Pinkas, Piano. 

They will present works by their name-sake Robert Schumann, as well as by Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Loeffler, Poulenc, Shostakovich and others. Gallant, Larson and Pinkas have each performed at notable venues, including Lincoln Center, the Frick Collection and Carnegie Hall in New York City, Jordan Hall in Boston, Wigmore Hall in London, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the festivals at Tanglewood, Ravinia, Lucerne, Spoleto and Mostly Mozart. Performing together since 2005, Ensemble Schumann has been featured at the prestigious Da Camera Series in Los Angeles, at the Clark Art Museum in Massachusetts and on Live From Fraser on WGBH- Radio in Boston.

Recent seasons have included performances for the Stockton Friends of Music in California, Mount Vernon Museum of Art and Principia College in Illinois, Cornell College in Iowa, Auburn Chamber Music Society in Alabama, Washington University Chamber Series in St. Louis, Young Auditorium in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and Strathmore Hall in Maryland, Big Arts on Sanibel Island, The Forum in St. Thomas, and appearances in Iowa, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Georgia.  Ensemble Schumann's recordings on the MSR Classics label have received high praise in such publications as Gramophone, Fanfare, and Audiophile Audition.
 
Considered by many to be the most difficult of all the musical instruments, the oboe is often called the “ill wind that no one blows good.”   Oboist Thomas Gallant is one of the world’s few virtuoso solo and chamber music performers on this instrument and he has been praised by The New Yorker magazine as “a player who unites technical mastery with intentness, charm and wit.”  Thomas Gallant is a First Prize Winner of the Concert Artists Guild International New York Competition.  His performances have taken him to Avery Fisher Hall, Weill Recital Hall and the Frick Collection in New York City, to Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, to the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and to the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.  He has appeared as guest soloist with the Kronos Quartet at the Ravinia Festival and has collaborated with flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, with Cuarteto Casals, the Colorado, Calder, Tesla and Lark Quartets, Cuarteto Latinoamericano and with the Adaskin String Trio.  Recent and upcoming performances include a concert of solo and chamber music works for the oboe at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and tours across the United States as soloist with Camerata Bariloche from Argentina performing concerti by J. S. Bach and Vaughan-Williams. Thomas Gallant is dedicated to performing neglected and contemporary works for the oboe and has given the New York premieres of works for oboe and strings by Berio and Penderecki as well as the Washington, DC premiere of Elliott Carter’s Quartet for oboe and strings. He is a member of Ensemble Schumann and Artistic Director for Frisson.
 
Violist Steve Larson is a Senior Artist Teacher at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford, where he has taught since 1998 and has served both as Chair for Strings and Chair of Chamber Music. He is a founding member of the acclaimed oboe, viola and piano trio, Ensemble Schumann, and the equally renowned Adaskin String Trio. He also performs and records in duo with his wife, violinist Annie Trépanier and throughout the Americas and Europe with their chamber groups, Avery Ensemble and Cuatro Puntos. Both groups also present their own Hartford, Connecticut concert series which present numerous world premieres and cross-cultural collaborations in programs specially crafted to give the music a meaningful context. Larson is Principal Viola of the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra and Chair of Viola Studies for the intensive string chamber music program at the Wintergreen Summer Music Academy in Virginia. He is a former member of the Alcan String Quartet and has performed as a guest with groups such as the Emerson Quartet and the Lions Gate Trio as well as with orchestras such as the Montreal Symphony and National Arts Center Orchestra.
Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada), Larson holds degrees from McGill University, l’Université de Montréal and The Hartt School.
At the 1997 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition in the United Kingdom he won second prize and received the special award for his performance of the commissioned work. He studied violin with Ernest Kassian, Elman Lowe, Howard Leyton-Brown, and Mauricio Fuks, viola with Jutta Puchhammer and Steve Tenenbom, and chamber music with members of the Emerson and Orford String Quartets. He plays an exceptional 17-3/8 inch viola made by Helmuth Keller in 1981.
 
Since her London debut at Wigmore Hall, Israeli-born pianist Sally Pinkas has been heard as soloist and chamber musician throughout the world.  Among career highlights are performances with the Boston Pops, the Aspen Philarmonia and New York's Jupiter Symphony, appearances at the festivals of Marlboro, Tanglewood, Aspen and Rockport, as well as Kfar Blum in Israel, Officina Scotese in Italy and Masters de Pontlevoy in France.  Pinkas' solo discography includes music by Schumann, Debussy, Faure, Rochberg and Christian Wolff for MSR, Centaur, Naxos, Albany and Mode labels.  The Wall Street Journal noted her "exquisite performance" in her "superlatively well-played" recording of Harold Shapero's Piano Music on Toccata Classics (UK), and Gramophone hailed her as "the scintillating force..."  in a Mozart release on MSR.  As collaborative artist, Pinkas fosters a number of ongoing partnerships: with her husband Evan Hirsch, the Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo has toured extensively throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, and will be making its Indonesia debut in 2019.  She collaborates regularly with the Adaskin String Trio, the Apple Hill String Quartet and the Uk's Villiers Quartet, and along with California-based clarinetist Patricia Shands will be appearing for the first time in Cuba and Brazil during the upcoming season.  Based in New England, Pinkas serves as Pianist-in-residence at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College and teaches at the College's Music Department.