Clark Art: In Concert With Performing Artists In Residence

Print Story | Email Story
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Sunday, Dec. 15 at 2 pm, the Clark Art Institute presents an afternoon of chamber music in the Michael Conforti Pavilion. 
 
Jeewon Park (piano) and Edward Arron (cello), artistic directors of the Clark's Performing Artists in Residence program, are joined by Amy Schwartz Moretti (violin) and Che-Yen Chen (viola). The program includes G. F. Handel/J. Halvorsen's Passacaglia for Violin and Cello, Georges Enescu's Concertstück for Viola and Piano, W. A. Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor (K. 478), and Gabriel Fauré's Piano Quartet in C Minor (op. 15).
 
Jeewon Park made her debut at age twelve performing Chopin's First Concerto with the Korean Symphony Orchestra. Park has since performed in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Seoul Arts Center in South Korea. Park and her husband Edward Arron are in their twelfth season as co-artistic directors of the Clark's Performing Artists in Residence series.
 
Since making his New York recital debut in 2000 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward Arron has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras and as a chamber musician throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He tours and records as a member of the renowned Ehnes String Quartet and is a regular guest with the Boston and Seattle Chamber Music Societies as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Arron has served on the music faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 2016.
 
Before becoming the inaugural Director of Mercer University's McDuffie Center for Strings, Macon, Georgia, in 2007, Amy Schwartz Moretti was concertmaster of the Florida Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony. She has premiered concertos for Matt Catingub and Christopher Schmitz, collaborated with James Ehnes for Prokofiev's Sonata for Two Violin and Bartók's 44 Duos (both receiving consecutive Juno Awards for Classical Album of the Year in 2014 and 2015), and performed the complete cycle of Beethoven String Quartets in Seoul, South Korea with the Ehnes Quartet.
 
Professor of Viola at University of California, Los Angeles's Herb Alpert School of Music, Che-Yen Chen previously served on the faculty of the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music. Chen joined the renowned Ehnes Quartet in 2023 and has performed and taught in music festivals across North America and Asia. As the founding and former member of the Formosa Quartet, he won the first prize in the 2006 London International String Quartet Competition. Chen was the principal violist of the San Diego Symphony and Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra and has appeared as guest principal with other major orchestras in North America.
 
Tickets $25 ($20 members, free for students with valid ID). For accessibility questions, call 413 458 0524. Advance registration required. Capacity is limited. No refunds.
 
This performance is presented through the support of the Sea Island Foundation. Jeewon Park performs on a Steinway & Sons piano, provided through a special arrangement with the firm.

Tags: Clark Art,   

If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
 
Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.
 
"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.
 
"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."
 
Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.
 
The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.
 
"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.
 
View Full Story

More Williamstown Stories