The Red Rocks Music Festival, held Friday, Sept. 8, through Saturday, Sept. 16, will present four concerts in Sedona.
Programs include: Friday, Sept. 8, at 7:30 p.m., dueling piano divas Andria Fennig and Ashley Snavley will present Americana Treasured Masterpieces, with works by Barber, Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin and MacDowell.
Saturday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 p.m., enjoy world music performed by clarinetist Nikola Djurica from Serbia, performing classical, Klezmer and Balkan selections. The program will include a clarinet quintet by Ante Grgn, an Arizona premiere.
Sunday, Sept. 10, at 2 p.m., Classical Jewels will be performed by Mozart clarinet quintet and Schubert piano quintet Trout. Performers include David Ehrlich, violin; Anna Kim Kazepides, violin; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola; Jan Simiz, cello; Michael Kazepides, double-bass; Teresa Ehrlich, piano; and Nikola Djurica, clarinet.
Saturday, Sept. 16, at 7:30 p.m., pianist Mikhail Yanovitsky, making his Arizona debut, will perform Tempest to the Silver Age, including works by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Scriabin.
Festival guest artists have performed extensively in Arizona and internationally.
Djurica was a concerto winner at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2010. He performed music from his native land by Ante Grgin, and has developed into a passionate advocate for music from many cultures around the world. During his first year at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Djurica was the prizewinner of the International Milhaud Competition.
During the summer of 2011, he performed a concert in the prestigious 66th Prague Spring music festival in conjunction with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and subsequently won the first prize on an International Music Competition Ohrid Pearls in Macedonia as a youngest clarinetist in his category. He performs regularly at the City Hall of Belgrade with an international cooperation of musicians, where his concerts are live on air and broadcast on the National Radio Station of Serbia.
In 2012, Djurica was selected to play at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. as a part of the Conservatory Project. Since the summer of 2012, Djurica was invited to teach clarinet and chamber music in an international chamber music festival in Prague called Ameropa.
Raised in Israel, artistic director and violinist Ehrlich started his professional career as concertmaster and soloist with the Tel Aviv Chamber Orchestra and toured as guest soloist with other Israeli chamber orchestras. In the U.S., after studying with Shmuel Ashkenasi, he served as concertmaster and soloist of the Colorado Festival Orchestra, Filarmonica de Caracas and Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, and was associate concertmaster with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Later, he joined the Audubon Quartet as first violinist and toured for 17 years all over the world, performing on some of the most prestigious concert series, collaborating with many of the world’s great chamber musicians and appearing on radio and television.
Ehrlich has conducted master classes and lectures at USC, New England Conservatory, Oberlin, Cleveland Institute of Music, Chautauqua-NY, Arizona State University and Tel Aviv University, and in Ireland, Venezuela, Prague, Beijing and many others. He is the head of an intensive studies course at Ameropa in Prague. This highlighted a series of performances at the prestigious Prague Spring Festival, where he was artistic director of a program dedicated to Schoenberg and Mahler.
He also performs annually at the Red Rocks Music Festival in Phoenix and Sedona. In 2013 and 2014, he helped mentor a new professional string orchestra in Hong Kong and conducted an intensive chamber music seminar in Beijing. Since 2004, he has served as a fellow of fine arts at Virginia Tech. He performs on a violin made by Carlo Bergonzi in 1735, through the generosity of the Virginia Tech Foundation.
In addition to her solo and orchestral engagements, pianist Teresa Ehrlich is active as a chamber musician and has performed as a guest artist with the Audubon, Vermeer, Cassatt and Vanbrugh quartets. Teresa Ehrlich has been a participant in the Banff Festival in Canada, Yale Chamber Music Festival, Music at Gretna Festival, New Hampshire Music Festival, Chautauqua Festival in New York and the Sanibel Island Festival.
She has performed during numerous live broadcasts on radio station WFMT in Chicago and is also frequently heard on National Public Radio.
As well as being a founder of the Renaissance Music Academy of Virginia, she is the executive director of the school and a member of the piano faculty. She is a member of the chamber group Avanti Ensemble, which performs throughout Virginia. Since 2005, Ehrlich has also been a faculty member in Ameropa.
A pianist, Fennig received her doctorate of musical arts from Arizona State University in 2002 and has a wide and all-encompassing piano performance background including solo performance, collaborative artistry, chamber music and pit orchestra work for touring Broadway shows and entertainer acts, including “Book of Mormon,” “Wicked,” “The Color Purple,” “Beautiful, Matilda,” “West Side Story,” Jackie Evancho, Chris Mann, Il Divo and Three Irish Tenors. An advocate for new music performance, she has performed with the Albuquerque-based LINKS Ensemble, Phoenix-based Crossing 32nd Street Ensemble and the Arizona State University-based New American Piano Music Ensemble.
She serves as accompanist and director of Contemporary Worship Arts at Paradise Valley United Methodist Church.
Born in Seoul, Korea, violinist Anna Kim Kazepides came to the United States to pursue her music studies at the Juilliard School. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees studying with teachers Joseph Fuchs, Margaret Pardee, Felix Galimir and Joel Smirnoff.
Prior to joining the Phoenix Symphony in September 1997 as a second violin, Kazepides freelanced in New York City and performed with many orchestras, including the Jupiter Symphony and Riverside Symphony. She gave her debut recital at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1992. Additionally, she has performed at Tanglewood, Banff Summer Festival, the Meadowmount Summer School and the Bowdoin Music Festival.
Kazepides enjoys playing chamber music and can be heard performing with the Phoenix Symphony Chamber Orchestra and the Downtown Chamber Series. In her free time, she likes to work out at the gym and spend time with her son, Alex, and her husband, Michael.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Michael Kazepides, double bassist, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia, where he served as principal bassist for five years and also performed as a member of the Vancouver Symphony. He earned his master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where he performed the American premier of Bantun, a contemporary bass concerto written by Betty Olivero, with the Juilliard Symphony at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. He is the associate principal bassist of the Phoenix Symphony and is the bass instructor at Phoenix and Mesa Community Colleges.
Ngwenyama’s performances as orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber musician garner great attention.
Gramophone proclaimed Ngwenyama’s playing as providing “solidly shaped music of bold, mesmerizing character,” and the Washington Post described her as playing “with dazzling technique in the virtuoso fast movements and deep expressiveness in the slow movements.”
Ngwenyama has performed throughout the United States and abroad. Domestic appearances include performances with the Atlanta, Baltimore and Indianapolis symphonies, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra. She has been heard in recital at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the Louvre, the Ford Center in Toronto and the Maison de Radio France. Summer festival appearances include Green Music, Vail, San Diego’s Mainly Mozart, Chamber Music Northwest, Marlboro Music Festival and Spoleto USA.
In addition to her performance activities, she served as visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2007, where she taught instrumental music and lectured in the areas of African music and music and world religions. She joined the faculty of Indiana University as visiting professor for the 2008-09 academic year and serves as director of the prestigious Primrose International Viola Competition.
Born in California of Zimbabwean-Japanese parent-age, Ngwenyama graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music. As a Fulbright scholar, she attended the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, and received a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University.
A native of Romania, cellist Jan Simiz studied at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory in Bucharest. In 1980, he arrived in Los Angeles and won the principal cellist position with Neal Stulberg and the Young Musicians’ Foundation Debut Orchestra. He received his master’s degree in cello performance from the University of Southern California, where he studied with Eleanor Schoenfeld.
In 1985, Simiz joined the Phoenix Symphony and became assistant principal cellist in 1989. He is also principal cellist for the Music in the Mountains Festival in Durango, Colo. He frequently performs in chamber music ensembles.
Pianist Ashley Snavely graduated from Arizona State University with a doctor of musical arts degree in organ performance in December 2014.
She was recently appointed the director of music and arts ministries at Paradise Valley United Methodist Church, after serving as the organist and assistant director for three years. She has played and participated in recitals on organs in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
Yanovitsky was born in Leningrad [St. Petersburg], where he began his study of the piano under the guidance of his mother. He graduated from the Leningrad Music School for Gifted Children and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.
He relocated to the U.S. and, in 1991, won the Young Concert Artists Auditions, becoming their most frequently re-engaged artist. While represented by Young Concert Artists, he played for the New York Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Gerald Schwartz, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas and several other orchestras in the U.S., Europe, Asia, South Africa and South America.
Yanovitsky has performed in 34 American states, including appearances at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, Convention Center in Philadelphia, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Chicago Cultural Center and Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
He has also performed in 15 European countries, as well as in Mexico, South Africa, Uruguay, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea and China. In 2001, Steinway & Sons named Yanovitsky a Steinway Artist. He teaches piano at Temple University.
Concerts will be held at the Sedona Creative Life Center, 333 Schnebly Hill Road. Cost is $25. Tickets and information are available at redrocksmusic
festival.com.
