Projects

2026/ 2027 Tour: An American in Paris

I am extremely fortunate to get to spend some time in France every summer as faculty at the wonderful Shkolnikova Academy at the breathtaking Chateau de la Flocilliere, in Sevremont, and every summer, my first stop is the luminescent city of Paris. Her reputation as divine inspiration for artists is embodied by her architecture, which to me always conjures a time devoted to rainy afternoons spent in smoky cafes drinking absinthe, or private gatherings in opulent salons that last until the small hours, artists and musicians sharing art and music and conversation with one other and with the creme de la creme of Parisian society.

My current tour, titled “An American in Paris” (I’m the American), is a love letter to bygone Paris, featuring works by notable artists who hung their hat in Paris, including Chopin, Faure, Boulanger, and Ravel, ending with Ravel’s theatrical tour de force for the piano, Gaspard de la Nuit.

So She Wants to Write a Fugue?

Taken from the title of Glenn Gould’s delightfully silly fugue for a quartet of four voices, this program features fugues written by female composers including Clara Schumann, Lera Auerbach, Irene Britton- Smith, and Grazyna Bacewicz, interspersed with famous fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Here is a clip of the Fugue, from Lera Auerbach’s Chorale, Fugue, and Postlude, written in 2008.

Photo credit Aleksandr Karjaka, 2016I’ve always been intrigued by the different ways composers approach the daunting compositional form of the fugue. This program explores the different methods used by a plethora of composers old, new, and historically excluded. Featuring fugues by Bach, Clara Schumann, Lera Auerbach, Dmitri Shostakovich, Irene Britton-Smith, and Grazyna Bacewicz. — Photo credit Aleksandr Karjaka, 2016
From an ongoing series of performances

Stories Without Words

In “Stories Without Words”, I wanted to bring attention to music that tells a story, and in so doing create a narrative arc using the connections between each piece. Stories Without Words features a journey across Europe, great love stories between artists and composers, a little opera, the world’s most famous storyteller, murderous mermaids, and ends with a fiery Polish dance.

Isolde’s dramatic death scene, the “Liebestod”, or Love-Death”, the end of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde.