The next Rendez-vous Musical will take place on April 3 in the Grand Salon. The musicians in residence and Harriet Hale Woolley scholars will perform a diverse program of classical music and a selection of well-known songs.
These concerts, which are an opportunity for the musicians to perform works they are studying or creating, are renowned for their open and friendly atmosphere. Members of audience, delighted to (re)discover classical, contemporary and new works, often stay behind to talk with the musicians. The musicians take great pleasure in these exchanges, always speaking about music and their specific disciplines with great passion.
Practical Information
Date : April 3 | Time : 5pm | Facebook Event
Please sign up by 5:30pm on Friday, April 1. If you were not able to reserve on time, you may come on the day and we will leave you in based on the number of free seats/no shows.
Covid: According to the latest announcements, masks are not mandatory but remain highly recommended. Please respect the general physical distancing guidelines. Hand sanitizer will be available at the entrance.
Program
Lusi Xie, piano
Robert Schumann, Novelette No. 8
Francis Poulenc, 3 Novelettes
Alfredo Casella (1883-1947)
Tre Canzoni Trecentesche
Sarah Grace Graves, voice
Simon Frisch, piano
Alessandra Gianino, voice and piano
About the Musicians
Alessandra Gianino is a singer and pianist with styles ranging from pop to musical theatre and jazz. She has toured with various groups (The Hundred Voices of Gospel, The SoCal VoCals a cappella) and has performed at notable venues including the Palais des Sports, the Beacon Theatre, Universal Studios, and the White House. She currently performs in Paris with a rock band and as a solo artist.
Lusi Xie is from Shenzhen, the Chinese capital of the piano. She studied at the same school as many famous pianists including Li Yundi and Chen Sa. In addition to her major in piano, she plays various percussion instruments and composes music with classical harmony. Lusi also has more than 8 years of experience playing with orchestras and is gifted in composition. As an undergraduate, she studied under pianist Chen Zhishuai, who did his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin Butler. He is a disciple of Dan Zhaoyi, a famous Chinese piano teacher. Lusi has performed in many concerts on and off university campus. She has participated in the piano master class of Madame Buffet François and Ienissei Ramic. In 2018, she won the first prize in the Guangdong Keyboard Competition and held solo piano concerts at the university. She has performed French and German works, as well as piano concertos by Norwegian composers. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in piano, she was successfully admitted to the École Normale de Musique de Paris. She is currently studying with Pierre Etcheverry who succeeded Jean Micault who was the privileged assistant of Alfred Cortot.
Sarah Grace Graves is a singer and composer of experimental music living in Paris, France. Her music contextualizes voice and instrument within the performer’s internal landscape of emotion, physical sensation, and sense memory. In March 2021 her experimental vocal recital Songs from the Chalet was released on Divertimento Ensemble’s Young Performers on Digital Stage concert series, featuring Graves performing her own compositions alongside selections from Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series and Giacinto Scelsi’s Canti del Capricorno. Her festival appearances include Voix Nouvelles Academy at Royaumont, Northwestern University New Music Conference, Westben Performer-Composer Residency, IlSuono Contemporary Music Week, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, and Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for contemporary music and electronics. She performs Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung with the Italian contemporary vocal ensemble Fragmente and is a founding member of Mockingbird and Magpie, an experimental voice/cello duo with Toronto-based composer and cellist Cory Harper-Latkovich. Sarah Grace holds a Master of Arts in Composition from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Music in Composition from Rice University. From 2021 until 2022 Sarah Grace will be a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellow at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris. She studies voice with Nicholas Isherwood.
Simon Frisch is an American composer based in New York City. The recipient of a 2020-2021 Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship, he will be based in Paris at the Fondation des États-Unis to compose a song cycle for period instruments exploring the cultural legacy of Anne of Brittany, queen of France from 1491 to 1514, while also a resident researcher at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique to study the politics of music practice at her court.
Recent projects of note include The Body Untied for soloists and baroque chamber orchestra (presented in New York by Région Bretagne, lightbox gallery, and others, in collaboration with multimedia artist Rachel Libeskind), and Sandglass Vespers for chamber orchestra at Alice Tully Hall (with Joel Sachs and the New Juilliard Ensemble), with residencies and studies at the Banff Arts Centre and Wildacres. Also an advocate for community engagement and emerging creative voices in music, Simon organized a series of summer chamber music concerts in the Ille-et-Vilaine/Côtes-d’Armor regions of Brittany, programming dozens of European and world premieres by diverse young composers in collaboration with local non-profits. These concerts, acclaimed in Le Telegramme, Ouest France, and Bretagne Actuelle, promoted creative and cultural heritage projects across many disciplines, including architecture and sculpture installation. He is currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at the Juilliard School, where he received his MM studying with Robert Beaser.