(Across from Arena Stage, where Maine Avenue turns into M Street SW.
Click HERE to see a map.)

Admission free, donations accepted.

The One Hundred Eighty-Sixth Concert

Thursday, December 20, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Поздравляю с Рождеством! (Pozdravliayu s Rozhdestvom!)

M E R R Y   C H R I S T M A S !

Another year has passed, and once again are looking forward to the joys of Christmas, a time when we’re all unreconstructed children, hoping that we have done things well enough to merit something good. Perhaps it’s love, perhaps no more than approval, but it’s surely a time of year to be good to others and trust they will repay in equal measure. We of the Southwest Chamber Players are assembled for the sole purpose of making and enjoying music with others (how well being a matter of individual judgment), but invariably pondering thoughts of kindness, friendliness, and affection.

Program:

About the Artists:

VASILY POPOV earned his BA, MM, and DMA, MM Cello Performance from St. Petersburg Conservatory. Currently Associate Chair of Chamber Music at the Levine School of Music, Vasily maintains an active concert schedule as a soloist and chamber musician boasting a wide classical repertoire, as well as a great interest in jazz and contemporary genres. He’s performed throughout Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United States, and much of his work has been broadcast in Germany, Russia, and here, notably including our own WETA 90.9 FM.

Vasily dedicates a great deal of his time to teaching and coaching, as well as to organizing and leading innovative chamber and orchestral workshops. He often shares the stage in performance with his students, many of whom have been accepted into youth and professional orchestras and gone on to become performing soloists and chamber musicians themselves. Although he’s featured on a violin tonight, his #1 instrument is a French cello made in 1870, a gift from Stephen and Susan Low.

RALITZA PATCHEVA, received a D.M.A. from the University of Maryland-College Park; M.M.A. and B.M.A. the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and Artist Diplomas in Piano Performance and Art Song Accompaniment from the Hochschule fur Musik, Munich, Germany. She has won numerous prizes in Europe as well as in Washington, and been heard in recital and chamber performance at concert halls locally and abroad.

At present she is Associate Chair of Chamber Music at Levine, where she is also on the piano faculty, in addition to being on the piano faculty of the Rome School of Music, Drama and Art at Catholic University.

Working as a cello-piano duo, Vasily and Ralitsa appear frequently in chamber concerts across the United States, most recently in Maine, Massachusetts, and Virginia. And on the first Thursday of every month, the pair can be heard in the Brown Bag Concert Series, which they founded in 2002. (Currently, the series is being hosted by the Goethe Institute in the temporary home of the Martin Luther King Library at 20th and K Streets downtown.)

YURI POPOV, aged 12, started on the violin in 2009 under the guidance of Ms. Phyllis Fleming, and is a veteran of the stage – not only here in town, but also in Maine. His teacher of record is Irina Briskin, and he’s already the associate concertmaster of a young artists orchestra in Montgomery County.

VLADISLAV POPOV, may be only 8, but he’s been playing the cello and piano for three of them, a student of his father and grandmother Elena Ostrovskaia. A third grader at Ashburton School in Bethesda, he’s also a keen soccer player.

Additional Artists:

JOYCE BOUVIER is clearly the doyenne of SWCP, appearing tonight for the 51st time. Classically trained, she has crossed comfortably into pop over the years. Entertaining Southwest audiences as well as nursing homes frequently, it’s hard to tell whether she prefers Irving Berlin or any of his competitors.

STEPHEN BROWN loves accompanying his wife Marje, but has a long history of piano performance. He received his doctorate in Vocal Accompanying from Catholic University. Having trained as a singer with Marilyn Cotlow, he enjoys working with singers, both as teacher and voice coach.

DAVID EHRLICH, founder and director of SWCP, learned the piano at six from his father Richard. Despite having learned at the age of seven that he was not destined to be the next Horowitz, he persevered throughout his life as an amateur, ultimately discovering the joys of making music with others through chamber music workshops.

JULIA GOUDIMOVA, our Russian-born cellist, was a student of a student of the much-loved Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor of the National Symphony. Before crossing the Atlantic, she’s done recitals and chamber music in Belarus, Moldova, Germany, South Korea, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; since then, has been actively participating in the musical life of Virginia, specifically at Washington and Lee University in Lexington.

NANCY GENOVESE brings her highly expressive clarinet to our team again. Nancy, a product of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, has a teaching studio in Falls Church and has participated in a wide variety of orchestras and clarinet choirs around the region.

GWYN JONES has been a much-appreciated presence on our stage over the last years, with a potpourri of “flutistic” collaborations and solo shows. Starting life in Rhode Island, her musical education took her through Texas and Florida before settling here in Southwest.

MARJE PALMIERI, a favorite of the Washington chapter of the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald Fanclub and the Southwest Chamber Players, boasts a repertoire of art songs ranging from Argento through Zemlinsky., in fact, she’s even mastered the Queen of the Night in Magic Flute. Her training comes from famed coloratura Marilyn Cotlow.

The Southwest Chamber Players is a loose aggregation of over 100 dedicated amateur musicians who have performed at Saint Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Southwest Washington for the past twenty years. Formed in March 1997, we have presented concerts of fine chamber music nearly each month since. Including every one of the orchestra’s instruments as well as singers of every voice range, our repertoire has extended from Bach and Telemann through Prokofiev and Barber, with heavy emphasis on the works of the great composers of the classical and romantic eras. Tonight marks our 186th appearance on the performing stage from its three-year exile to celebrate this magnificent new church!

David Ehrlich, the director, learned the piano from the age of six from his father, Richard. Though his life’s work was in the retail business, he never lost touch with performing music as both pianist and singer. Today he burnishes his skills annually at the University of North Carolina’s chamber music workshop in Chapel Hill; he also sojourned in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Lexington, Virginia; and Lyndonville, Vermont. Our website southwestchamberplayers.org lists a fair sampling of past concert programs as well as biographies of many of the performers.

No required dollars change hands. None of the performers is paid; admission to concerts is free, though we do gratefully accept donations to offset the minor expenses of publicity and post-concert receptions. SWCP attracts much of its audience from the Southwest community, and for years maintained a mailing list of several hundred until our church venue was razed in 2014.