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Concert 6 – The Music of Reena Esmail
Reena Esmail (b. 1983) is an acclaimed Indian-American composer based in Los Angeles, known for bridging Indian and Western classical music traditions. A graduate of Juilliard and the Yale School of Music, she has served as artist-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony and Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Sunday, April 12, 2026 @ 3:00 PM
Viterbo University Nola Starling Recital Hall
PERFORMERS, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano | Mary Ellen Haupert, piano | Alexander Fowler, cello
Theodora Nestorova, soprano | Michelle Elliott, violin
PROGRAM
Rosa de Sal
2023
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail (b. 1983) originally wrote Rosa De Sal for soprano and piano, using text from Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neurda’s Sonnet XVII. Esmail is known for interweaving raag with traditional Western orchestral colors. A raag is a melodic framework in Indian classical music, used for improvisation and evoking specific emotions in the listener. The word originates from the Sanskrit word for “color,” meaning it “colors the mind” with feelings like joy, sadness, devotion, or romance. Each raag has a unique set of rules and melodic structures, often associated with a particular time of day or season, and forms the basis for improvisation in the music. This version for trumpet and orchestra was commissioned by Mary Elizabeth Bowden, and premiered in 2023.
In Esmail’s own words, “The poetry of Neruda is at once so direct and so subtle. How better to capture the beautiful, intimate, subtle sensation of loving another person? The sensation of the poem led me to a setting based on the Hindustani raag of Puriya Dhanashree — which is also dark and longing, which reaches out past those quotidian comforts into the vast complexity of desire. I could say more — but the text says it better than I ever could:”
Sonnet XVII
Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Taspcott
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
I Do Not Know What I Know
2022
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
When a person is gaslit, they are taught to not trust their own mind, their memories and reasoning. Their thoughts become rearranged, and with their thoughts, their reality. This can be true for an abused domestic partner, and it can be true for a public confused by disinformation and propaganda. To start toward healing, one must name the confusion for what it is. I Do Not Know What I Know is an aria that eerily reveals this struggle for Democracy, as she begins to fight for her own clarity and her right to fact. Adapted for individual performance from Say Your Name, a voting-rights cantata composed by Reena Esmail and written by Rebecca Gayle Howell.
Say Your Name was commissioned by Amherst College Choir and Orchestra. It was premiered on November 5, 2022 at Amherst College, Amherst MA by Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Alice Rogers, soprano; Amherst Choir and orchestra, Arianne Abela, conductor
Text Excerpt:
Have you
been controlled?
Have you been told you’re wrong
when you’re right?
[…]
Have you ever been
too scared
to breathe
I have
I have
*SHORT BREAK FOR STAGE RESET*
Jhula Jhule
2013
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
This piece was originally written for violin and piano. These are the program notes for the original work.
When writing this piece, to be based upon Indian folksong, I cast a wide net for source material – I scoured the internet and my large collection of Indian music, listening to everything from Bengali Bauls, Rajasthani folk singing. I even tried to find songs from Goa and Gujarat, the places my parents are from in India, typing every conceivable search term into Google. However, the material I felt most connected to in the end didn’t come to me from a distant corner of India, but in the most common way folk music can be transmitted: through the generations of my own family.
This piece uses two folk melodies. The first is a song called “Ankhon vina andharon re”, which I found on a recording my mother’s father made long before I was born. Of his five grandchildren, I am the only one who never met him. But as I’ve grown up, I realize how much we have in common, including our deep love of music. My mother often tells me stories of listening to records of Beethoven Symphonies on hot nights in Kenya, where my grandfather spent most of his life. All the lights were turned off, and they would listen as a family, in the silent darkness, following his lead as he taught them to savor each note. We still have recordings of my grandfather singing songs in many languages – English, Marathi, Konkani, Portuguese and others – which I listen to from time to time, imagining what it might have been like to know him.
The other song comes to me from my grandmother, my father’s mother. My father’s parents (who even our American friends affectionately called Mamma and Pappa) moved to the US the year before I was born, and lived with us for most of my childhood. I grew up speaking to Mamma only in Gujarati, a language that I spoke to no one else until she died in 2007. As a baby, Mamma would often sing me this lullaby: Jhula Jhule, Jhula Jhule / Reena Rani Jhula Jhule which translates: Back and forth, back and forth / Reena the Queen swings back and forth. It has been years since I have thought about this melody, but while working on this project, it suddenly popped back into my mind. I’m so glad it did – it is one of the few musical memories I have of her.
Working on this piece was very special for me. I spent most of my childhood as a first-generation American unconsciously trying to separate my home life from my outside life. I became aware very early on that there was no real resonance for my Indian culture in my American surroundings. As a composer, I’ve often quoted from pieces I love (mostly by other western composers, and more recently from Hindustani bandishes). But this is the first time I’ve felt able to bring songs from my own family into my music, and into the western concert hall. I think – I hope – I’ve finally found a point of resonance.
--Reena Esmail
*SHORT BREAK FOR STAGE RESET*
Dhire Dhire
2022
Theodora Nestorova, soprano
Michelle Elliott, violin
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
I am constantly drawn to the ‘dohe’ (couplets) of Kabir. His statements are pithy but their meanings are vast. They have been set and sung for hundreds of years in the Hindustani classical tradition, and they seem to meet each generation of performers and listeners in a unique way. This tiny couplet is about patience. The singer beckons her own mind to be patient — that everything will come in its own time. Just as a seed can be watered a hundred times, it will only bloom in spring.
This work was written specifically for young musicians. I know that the music I learned early on in my musical training made a deep impression on me — perhaps because I was learning music itself through those pieces. If anything about this work stays with the young musicians who encounter it, I hope it is Kabir’s timeless message. Dhire Dhire was premiered on July 3rd, 2022 at the Music Teachers’ Association of California Convention, in Anaheim CA.
--Reena Esmail
Text:
Dhire Dhire re mana
Dhire sub kuch hoya
Maali seenche sau gharaa
Ritu aaye, phal hoya
Translation:
Little by little, dear mind
Gradually, everything comes to be
The gardener can water a hundred times
But the fruit only comes in spring
Piano Trio
2019
Michelle Elliott, violin
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
I. Ephemeral
II. Breathing
III. Capricious
IV. Powerful, broad, intense
Notes:
Writing a Piano Trio has fulfilled one of Esmail’s oldest ambitions as a musician. Growing up as a talented pianist, trios with violin and cello were her favorite form of chamber music, and she won a life-changing competition that resulted in her performing Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Trio with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also counts Ravel’s Piano Trio as an all-time favorite work, noting, “So much of what I’ve learned about color and texture in my writing comes from Ravel.” After three years of work and a pile of sketches that is up to 300 pages and counting (with less that three weeks togo before the premiere), Esmail was still polishing off this substantial score that reckons with the rigorous tradition of the four-movement piano trio.
Authentic raags appear in each movement of the trio, including the monsoon season raag known as Megh that informs a chorale from the strings and other gestures in the first movement. In a tempo marked “Ephemeral,” the smooth modal phrases and long slurs highlight Esmail’s affinity with Ravel, who also looked outside the Western canon to expand his shimmering soundscapes. Flutters, slides and harmonics continue in the slow movement, creating a sense of improvisatory freedom while the music slips in and out of time.
By casting the quivering third movement as a scherzo, Esmail acknowledges her debt to Mendelssohn (the king of those elfin, lighter-than-air diversions), but moments of manic hilarity and sheer muscle recall a more subversive master of the piano trio, Shostakovich. In the finale, a singing string melody supported by “luminous” piano filigree surges to a droning climax marked “powerful, broad, intense.”
When the unhurried ending arrives with glimmering harmonics and crystalline chords, this work completes an arc that places it squarely within the storied lineage of the “classical” piano trio—while making it clear just how irrelevant such boundaries truly are.
--Aaron Grad (for the 2019 premiere)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Reena Esmail (b. 1983) is an acclaimed Indian-American composer based in Los Angeles, known for bridging Indian and Western classical music traditions. A graduate of Juilliard and the Yale School of Music, she has served as artist-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony and Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Sunday, April 12, 2026 @ 3:00 PM
Viterbo University Nola Starling Recital Hall
PERFORMERS, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano | Mary Ellen Haupert, piano | Alexander Fowler, cello
Theodora Nestorova, soprano | Michelle Elliott, violin
PROGRAM
Rosa de Sal
2023
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail (b. 1983) originally wrote Rosa De Sal for soprano and piano, using text from Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neurda’s Sonnet XVII. Esmail is known for interweaving raag with traditional Western orchestral colors. A raag is a melodic framework in Indian classical music, used for improvisation and evoking specific emotions in the listener. The word originates from the Sanskrit word for “color,” meaning it “colors the mind” with feelings like joy, sadness, devotion, or romance. Each raag has a unique set of rules and melodic structures, often associated with a particular time of day or season, and forms the basis for improvisation in the music. This version for trumpet and orchestra was commissioned by Mary Elizabeth Bowden, and premiered in 2023.
In Esmail’s own words, “The poetry of Neruda is at once so direct and so subtle. How better to capture the beautiful, intimate, subtle sensation of loving another person? The sensation of the poem led me to a setting based on the Hindustani raag of Puriya Dhanashree — which is also dark and longing, which reaches out past those quotidian comforts into the vast complexity of desire. I could say more — but the text says it better than I ever could:”
Sonnet XVII
Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Taspcott
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
I Do Not Know What I Know
2022
Elizabeth Pearse, soprano
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
When a person is gaslit, they are taught to not trust their own mind, their memories and reasoning. Their thoughts become rearranged, and with their thoughts, their reality. This can be true for an abused domestic partner, and it can be true for a public confused by disinformation and propaganda. To start toward healing, one must name the confusion for what it is. I Do Not Know What I Know is an aria that eerily reveals this struggle for Democracy, as she begins to fight for her own clarity and her right to fact. Adapted for individual performance from Say Your Name, a voting-rights cantata composed by Reena Esmail and written by Rebecca Gayle Howell.
Say Your Name was commissioned by Amherst College Choir and Orchestra. It was premiered on November 5, 2022 at Amherst College, Amherst MA by Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Alice Rogers, soprano; Amherst Choir and orchestra, Arianne Abela, conductor
Text Excerpt:
Have you
been controlled?
Have you been told you’re wrong
when you’re right?
[…]
Have you ever been
too scared
to breathe
I have
I have
*SHORT BREAK FOR STAGE RESET*
Jhula Jhule
2013
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
This piece was originally written for violin and piano. These are the program notes for the original work.
When writing this piece, to be based upon Indian folksong, I cast a wide net for source material – I scoured the internet and my large collection of Indian music, listening to everything from Bengali Bauls, Rajasthani folk singing. I even tried to find songs from Goa and Gujarat, the places my parents are from in India, typing every conceivable search term into Google. However, the material I felt most connected to in the end didn’t come to me from a distant corner of India, but in the most common way folk music can be transmitted: through the generations of my own family.
This piece uses two folk melodies. The first is a song called “Ankhon vina andharon re”, which I found on a recording my mother’s father made long before I was born. Of his five grandchildren, I am the only one who never met him. But as I’ve grown up, I realize how much we have in common, including our deep love of music. My mother often tells me stories of listening to records of Beethoven Symphonies on hot nights in Kenya, where my grandfather spent most of his life. All the lights were turned off, and they would listen as a family, in the silent darkness, following his lead as he taught them to savor each note. We still have recordings of my grandfather singing songs in many languages – English, Marathi, Konkani, Portuguese and others – which I listen to from time to time, imagining what it might have been like to know him.
The other song comes to me from my grandmother, my father’s mother. My father’s parents (who even our American friends affectionately called Mamma and Pappa) moved to the US the year before I was born, and lived with us for most of my childhood. I grew up speaking to Mamma only in Gujarati, a language that I spoke to no one else until she died in 2007. As a baby, Mamma would often sing me this lullaby: Jhula Jhule, Jhula Jhule / Reena Rani Jhula Jhule which translates: Back and forth, back and forth / Reena the Queen swings back and forth. It has been years since I have thought about this melody, but while working on this project, it suddenly popped back into my mind. I’m so glad it did – it is one of the few musical memories I have of her.
Working on this piece was very special for me. I spent most of my childhood as a first-generation American unconsciously trying to separate my home life from my outside life. I became aware very early on that there was no real resonance for my Indian culture in my American surroundings. As a composer, I’ve often quoted from pieces I love (mostly by other western composers, and more recently from Hindustani bandishes). But this is the first time I’ve felt able to bring songs from my own family into my music, and into the western concert hall. I think – I hope – I’ve finally found a point of resonance.
--Reena Esmail
*SHORT BREAK FOR STAGE RESET*
Dhire Dhire
2022
Theodora Nestorova, soprano
Michelle Elliott, violin
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Notes:
I am constantly drawn to the ‘dohe’ (couplets) of Kabir. His statements are pithy but their meanings are vast. They have been set and sung for hundreds of years in the Hindustani classical tradition, and they seem to meet each generation of performers and listeners in a unique way. This tiny couplet is about patience. The singer beckons her own mind to be patient — that everything will come in its own time. Just as a seed can be watered a hundred times, it will only bloom in spring.
This work was written specifically for young musicians. I know that the music I learned early on in my musical training made a deep impression on me — perhaps because I was learning music itself through those pieces. If anything about this work stays with the young musicians who encounter it, I hope it is Kabir’s timeless message. Dhire Dhire was premiered on July 3rd, 2022 at the Music Teachers’ Association of California Convention, in Anaheim CA.
--Reena Esmail
Text:
Dhire Dhire re mana
Dhire sub kuch hoya
Maali seenche sau gharaa
Ritu aaye, phal hoya
Translation:
Little by little, dear mind
Gradually, everything comes to be
The gardener can water a hundred times
But the fruit only comes in spring
Piano Trio
2019
Michelle Elliott, violin
Alexander Fowler, cello
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
I. Ephemeral
II. Breathing
III. Capricious
IV. Powerful, broad, intense
Notes:
Writing a Piano Trio has fulfilled one of Esmail’s oldest ambitions as a musician. Growing up as a talented pianist, trios with violin and cello were her favorite form of chamber music, and she won a life-changing competition that resulted in her performing Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Trio with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also counts Ravel’s Piano Trio as an all-time favorite work, noting, “So much of what I’ve learned about color and texture in my writing comes from Ravel.” After three years of work and a pile of sketches that is up to 300 pages and counting (with less that three weeks togo before the premiere), Esmail was still polishing off this substantial score that reckons with the rigorous tradition of the four-movement piano trio.
Authentic raags appear in each movement of the trio, including the monsoon season raag known as Megh that informs a chorale from the strings and other gestures in the first movement. In a tempo marked “Ephemeral,” the smooth modal phrases and long slurs highlight Esmail’s affinity with Ravel, who also looked outside the Western canon to expand his shimmering soundscapes. Flutters, slides and harmonics continue in the slow movement, creating a sense of improvisatory freedom while the music slips in and out of time.
By casting the quivering third movement as a scherzo, Esmail acknowledges her debt to Mendelssohn (the king of those elfin, lighter-than-air diversions), but moments of manic hilarity and sheer muscle recall a more subversive master of the piano trio, Shostakovich. In the finale, a singing string melody supported by “luminous” piano filigree surges to a droning climax marked “powerful, broad, intense.”
When the unhurried ending arrives with glimmering harmonics and crystalline chords, this work completes an arc that places it squarely within the storied lineage of the “classical” piano trio—while making it clear just how irrelevant such boundaries truly are.
--Aaron Grad (for the 2019 premiere)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES (in order of appearance)
Vocalist Liz Pearse has alternately been described as a “badass”, having “a near-psychic understanding of what a composer is trying to accomplish”, and possessing “a voice made of arrows forged in a volcanic pit, transforming the didactic and mundanely intellectual into actual fire”. As an active chamber and choral musician, Liz has enjoyed invitations to perform at festivals and venues around Europe and North America. In spring 2025, she made her Ordway debut in the Twin Cities singing Osvaldo Golijov's Oceana under the baton of Dr. Ahmed Anzaldúa with Border CrosSing Choir, an ensemble she is privileged to work with as a soloist and chorister. Most recently internationally, she sang concerts in Luzern and Wittnau, Switzerland with Damselfly Trio, and summer 2023 brought her debut performances in Mexico performing with Quince on the Festival de Mayo in Guadalajara and with Cepromusic in Mexico City, where she performed as the alto soloist in György Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures.
Mary Ellen Haupert, pianist, is currently a professor and chair of the Viterbo University Music Department where she teaches music history, theory, composition, applied piano, and piano proficiency courses. She was awarded the Alec Chui Memorial Award in 2012 (for fostering student research) and Teacher of the Year in 2014. Mary Ellen is passionate about chamber music and is credited as founder/artistic director of the One-of-a-Kind Chamber Music Series (2008-2018), the Out-of-Our-Minds Chamber Music Series (2018-present), and the Bonfire Chamber Music Series (2018 – 2023) – a summer series sponsored by the Reif Center in Grand Rapids, MN. Mary Ellen has presented her theory pedagogy at national and international conferences, recorded two albums of chamber by Louise Farrenc on the CENTAUR label, and is a published composer. While she enjoys making connections with other musicians via chamber music, Mary Ellen is most often seen on trails in the marsh or bluffs.
Alex Fowler is a cellist based in Boston, MA. He attended the New England Conservatory where he earned a Masters and Graduate Diploma studying under Yeesun Kim. In 2019 he was awarded the John Cage Award for Contemporary Practice and Performance and in 2020 won NEC’s Spark Award for his work as a musical storyteller, sharing programs of solo cello music and original stories with young audiences throughout Boston. An active performer in the Boston area, he has performed with the Cape Symphony, the New Bedford Symphony, the Cape Ann Symphony, the DuBois Orchestra, and the Fermata Chamber Soloists. Alex was also a 2022-2023 Music for Food Artist Fellow, a 2022 Emmanuel Bach Institute Fellow, and is one half of the soprano-cello duo, Pizzicanto.
Bulgarian-British-American soprano, researcher, and teacher Theodora Ivanova Nestorova was most recently published as first author in a Journal of Voice article involving her original research on vocal vibrato. The 2018-2019 first-place winner of the American Prize in Vocal Performance (Art Song), Theodora is an avid early and contemporary musician, singing the world premiere as the title role, Galatea, in Dean Burry’sIl giudizio di Pigmalione and recording on the Aparté record label with the Wladigeroff Brothers, at the Bulgarian National Radio, and with the Indictus Project. Theodora has performed with Fermata Chamber Soloists, in the Jordan Hall Liederabend Series, Wien Modern Festival, Bang on a Can, and Emmanuel Music’s The Bach Institute. One-half of Pizzicanto Soprano-Cello Duo, Theodora was invited to serve as a Music for Food Artist Fellow for the 2022-23 season.
Michelle Lee Elliott, violinist, has enjoyed a diverse musical career as a chamber musician, orchestral musician, and soloist. As a founding member of the Vinca Quartet, which was appointed as the first resident quartet to study and collaborate with the Takács Quartet at the University of Colorado. The Vinca Quartet were prizewinners of the Fischoff National String Quartet competition, and laureates of the Chesapeake and Plowman Chamber Music Competitions, as well as the Premio Paolo Borciani Competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The Vinca Quartet was also selected to participate in the Emerson Quartet’s Carnegie Hall Training Workshop where they were hailed as “stunning” and “musicians worth keeping an eye on” by the New York Times.
Vocalist Liz Pearse has alternately been described as a “badass”, having “a near-psychic understanding of what a composer is trying to accomplish”, and possessing “a voice made of arrows forged in a volcanic pit, transforming the didactic and mundanely intellectual into actual fire”. As an active chamber and choral musician, Liz has enjoyed invitations to perform at festivals and venues around Europe and North America. In spring 2025, she made her Ordway debut in the Twin Cities singing Osvaldo Golijov's Oceana under the baton of Dr. Ahmed Anzaldúa with Border CrosSing Choir, an ensemble she is privileged to work with as a soloist and chorister. Most recently internationally, she sang concerts in Luzern and Wittnau, Switzerland with Damselfly Trio, and summer 2023 brought her debut performances in Mexico performing with Quince on the Festival de Mayo in Guadalajara and with Cepromusic in Mexico City, where she performed as the alto soloist in György Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures.
Mary Ellen Haupert, pianist, is currently a professor and chair of the Viterbo University Music Department where she teaches music history, theory, composition, applied piano, and piano proficiency courses. She was awarded the Alec Chui Memorial Award in 2012 (for fostering student research) and Teacher of the Year in 2014. Mary Ellen is passionate about chamber music and is credited as founder/artistic director of the One-of-a-Kind Chamber Music Series (2008-2018), the Out-of-Our-Minds Chamber Music Series (2018-present), and the Bonfire Chamber Music Series (2018 – 2023) – a summer series sponsored by the Reif Center in Grand Rapids, MN. Mary Ellen has presented her theory pedagogy at national and international conferences, recorded two albums of chamber by Louise Farrenc on the CENTAUR label, and is a published composer. While she enjoys making connections with other musicians via chamber music, Mary Ellen is most often seen on trails in the marsh or bluffs.
Alex Fowler is a cellist based in Boston, MA. He attended the New England Conservatory where he earned a Masters and Graduate Diploma studying under Yeesun Kim. In 2019 he was awarded the John Cage Award for Contemporary Practice and Performance and in 2020 won NEC’s Spark Award for his work as a musical storyteller, sharing programs of solo cello music and original stories with young audiences throughout Boston. An active performer in the Boston area, he has performed with the Cape Symphony, the New Bedford Symphony, the Cape Ann Symphony, the DuBois Orchestra, and the Fermata Chamber Soloists. Alex was also a 2022-2023 Music for Food Artist Fellow, a 2022 Emmanuel Bach Institute Fellow, and is one half of the soprano-cello duo, Pizzicanto.
Bulgarian-British-American soprano, researcher, and teacher Theodora Ivanova Nestorova was most recently published as first author in a Journal of Voice article involving her original research on vocal vibrato. The 2018-2019 first-place winner of the American Prize in Vocal Performance (Art Song), Theodora is an avid early and contemporary musician, singing the world premiere as the title role, Galatea, in Dean Burry’sIl giudizio di Pigmalione and recording on the Aparté record label with the Wladigeroff Brothers, at the Bulgarian National Radio, and with the Indictus Project. Theodora has performed with Fermata Chamber Soloists, in the Jordan Hall Liederabend Series, Wien Modern Festival, Bang on a Can, and Emmanuel Music’s The Bach Institute. One-half of Pizzicanto Soprano-Cello Duo, Theodora was invited to serve as a Music for Food Artist Fellow for the 2022-23 season.
Michelle Lee Elliott, violinist, has enjoyed a diverse musical career as a chamber musician, orchestral musician, and soloist. As a founding member of the Vinca Quartet, which was appointed as the first resident quartet to study and collaborate with the Takács Quartet at the University of Colorado. The Vinca Quartet were prizewinners of the Fischoff National String Quartet competition, and laureates of the Chesapeake and Plowman Chamber Music Competitions, as well as the Premio Paolo Borciani Competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The Vinca Quartet was also selected to participate in the Emerson Quartet’s Carnegie Hall Training Workshop where they were hailed as “stunning” and “musicians worth keeping an eye on” by the New York Times.
