Annual Spring Concerts Poster

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Artwork by Susan Dunn

New Music Guild, Inc. Features Violinist/Violist, Wanda Sobieska

The New Music Guild’s third concert set of the season will take place at 7:00 p.m. Saturday, May 20^th, 2017 at the First Congregational Church of Jefferson, Ohio (an attractive small red brick church, built 1828), and at 4:00 p.m. Sunday, May 21^st, 2017 at Saints Peter and Paul Church, Holy Apostles Parish, 421 Covington Street in downtown Youngstown. If you take Lincoln Ave west from 5^th Ave on the YSU Campus, it intersects Covington Street after about half a mile. The brown brick Art Nouveau church has a steeple and will be on your right. It is a beautiful acoustic space.

The free admission events will feature violinist/violist, Wanda Sobieska, assisted by Kent State pianist, Seung Hyun Yoo, and Youngstown violinist/violist, Katherine O’Neill. Both Churches will sponsor special receptions with refreshments in honor of Sobieska and the other musicians.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Sobieska belongs to the fifth generation of a family of musicians and musicologists. She has appeared as solo and chamber musician in the United States, Poland, and Canada. She regularly plays in many professional orchestras.

She began studying violin ay the age of five, and attended the Grazyna Bacewicz School of Music in Warsaw, the Cleveland Music School Settlement and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where she earned her Bachelor’s in Violin Performance summa cum laude.

Sobieska is also a gifted arranger and has studied composition for many years. Recent arranging engagements include commissions by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the English Symphony Orchestra. In 2009 she launched www.freegigmusic.com, a website dedicated to making much-needed sheet music available to working musicians. Featuring her own practical arrangements of commonly requested pieces available for free while adhering to standards of high quality, the site currently serves over 1000 visitors a day worldwide.

South Korean musician Seung Hyun Yoo was a visiting grad assistant, scholarship holder, and accompanist for both the Kent State Chorale and Chorus. He holds masters degrees in both Piano and Composition.

Katherine O’Neill served as concertmaster of the YSU Dana Symphony and as assistant concertmaster in the Warren Philharmonic.

Wanda Sobieska will perform the world premiere of YSU’s Emeritus Professor Robert Rollin’s Adam’s and Aidan’s Reverie (2017) accompanied by Yoo. Adam Dunn, the composer’s son-in-law and Aidan Dunn, the composer’s 3-year old grandson, inspired the composition.

Violinist Gwyneth Rollin will begin the concert with Robert Rollin’s Hebraic Prayer, accompanied by the composer at the piano. The melody, known worldwide, is from the Jewish Saturday worship service. The piece begins with a rhapsodic violin cadenza and moves to invertible counterpoint between violin and piano. Gwyneth Rollin studied Violin and Music Theory at the University of Calgary and Indiana University. She played in the National Youth Symphony of Canada, Calgary Philharmonic, Youngstown Symphony, and Warren Philharmonic.

Sobieska will play Petro Mascagni’s gypsy Violin Solo from his opera, L’amico Fritz.

She will also perform the Ohio premiere of Rollin’s Variations for Solo Viola, a lively and intricate composition employing 12-tone technique.

Sobieska and O’Neill will present Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s charming Five Duos for Two Violins, including Pillow Dance, Ruthenian Song, Pizzicato, Slovakian Folk Song, and Ruthenian Dance. They will also play Rollin’s Three English Duos. These include Greensleeves Variations on the famous folk song; The Ravens, on a 16^th Century courtly love long; and The Keeper in Summer, a piece that combines the 14^th-century round, Summer is a Cummin In with The Keeper, another courtly song about a reluctant hunter.

Sobieska, Yoo, and O’Neill will perform Three Children’s Songs by Witold Lutoslawski, entitled Little Gregory is Walking, Kitten, and Dance. The new version, arranged by Sobieska, will be for two violins and piano.