New England Piano Quartette to perform
The New England Piano Quartette will perform the annual Alvin E. David Concert with works by Beethoven, Martinu and Faure at 8 p.m. Friday, March 3, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The performance will be followed by a reception in the Olin lobby, and the public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the Olin Arts Center at 207-786-6135.
The chamber music ensemble features pianist Frank Glazer, violinist Curtis Macomber, violist Scott Woolweaver and cellist George Sopkin. Artist-in-residence and lecturer in music at Bates since 1980, Glazer previously served on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester for 15 years. A specialist in Beethoven, he is a recipient of the distinguished Paderewski Piano Medal, awarded in London to “an artist of superlative degree.”
His performances have taken him throughout the United States, South America, Europe and the Near East. He has performed at Carnegie and Avery Fischer halls in New York, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. A founding member of the New England Piano Quartette, Glazer performs regularly in the Portland Chamber Music Society series.
According to the New York Observer, “Macomber’s intensely human fiddle seems an entire universe, sufficient unto itself.” A versatile solo and chamber musician, Macomber is equally comfortable with and committed to works from Bach to Babbit. His discography includes the complete Brahms string quartets as well as the Roger Sessions solo sonata. Macomber has recorded for a variety of labels including Nonesuch and CRI, which recently released his second solo recording, “Songs of Solitude,” named one of the best solo instrumental discs in 1996.
A featured lecturer and recitalist in the first American Violin Congress in 1987, Macomber was a second-prize winner in the 1980 Rockefeller Foundation International Competition for the Performance of 20th Century American Violin Music.
Macomber has given recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the Kennedy Center. He has soloed with the Musica Aeterna Orchestra, the Juilliard Symphony and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. As first violinist of the award-winning New World String Quartet from 1982 to 1993, Macomber recorded 14 discs and performed frequently on public television in the United States and Great Britain.
A member of the violin faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, Macomber holds a bachelor’s and advanced degrees from the Juilliard School. He was appointed artist in residence at Harvard University from 1982 to 1990. Woolweaver is a founding member of the Boston Composers String Quartet and plays viola for the Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society and Boston Baroque. A champion of 20th-century music, he has premiered numerous works for the viola, many which were written for him.
Woolweaver teaches at Tufts University, Newton Music School and the University of Massachusetts and records for, among others, the Orion, TelDec and Decca labels. He joined the Ives String Quartet in 1999.
A founding member of both the Fine Arts Quartet and the New England Piano Quartette, Sopkin has recorded solo cello repertoire by Ernest Bloch and John Downey and solo works written for him by Werner Torkanowsky. He has performed and lectured at festivals and concert halls throughout the world. After faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Carnegie Mellon University, Sopkin moved to Surrey, Maine, where he has been on the staff of the Kneisel Hall School of Chamber Music since 1995.
The annual Alvin E. David Concert is funded by a bequest to Bates College made in 1998 by Alvin David, father of Gerald David, Bates class of 1960, from Morris Plain, N.J. The endowed fund supports a classical concert on campus.
