Rogell Promotes Chamber Music in New DVD. Dana Lauren Records with Sandoval.
Brubaker's Latest
Violist Gillian Rogell, who heads the chamber music faculty in the School of Continuing Education, teaches at Walnut Hill School, and coaches at a variety of summer festivals, has just produced a fascinating and touching DVD, At the Heart of Chamber Music. An outgrowth of Rogell’s educational institute of the same name, the DVD was created in collaboration with NEC faculty Paul Katz and the prize-winning Jupiter Quartet. It offers a practical guide to young professional string players who “might find themselves teaching on a very different level than they expected”…coaching chamber music ensembles of middle- and high-school students and adult amateurs. With many scenes of Katz working with the Jupiters,and excerpts from the Brahms Sextet in G Major (Barry Schiffman is the second violist), the recording also offers listeners insight into the alchemy of chamber music. Rogell says that “a casual listener who admitted he had always ‘daydreamed’ during chamber music concerts, couldn’t wait to hear a live concert after seeing this video and was moved to tears as he experienced the string sextet Verkläerte Nacht of Schoenberg for the first time.” Those interested in more information about the DVD, should visit Rogell’s website
Rogell isn’t the only faculty member who has been documenting the art of chamber music. Soprano Barbara Winchester, co-chair of the Prep voice department, has just released the second edition of Vocal Chamber Music: A Performer's Guide with co-author Kay Dunlap. The first edition was published in 1985 by Garland Press, and has long been out-of-print. The new publisher is Taylor & Francis Group.
Sarah Nadeau ’98 Vocal Performance, who is Deputy Director of the Council for Prejudice Reduction, moderated a United Nations-sponsored student observance of the International Day of Peace, September 21, at United Nations headquarters in New York. Nadeau reports that she mentioned NEC at the event and “shared the dais with the likes of the Secretary General, Elie Wiesel, Jane Goodall and Michael Douglas.”
Elegant jazz vocalist Dominique Eade will appear at Scullers Jazz Club, Oct. 3 in her only fall appearance. She will be playing with “a really exciting band consisting of guitarist Brad Shepik, percussionist John Hadfield and bass Kim Cass." There will be one show at 8 p.m. Check out details
A student of Eade’s, Dana Lauren Bercowetz ’10, who goes by “Dana Lauren” when she is performing, recorded with Arturo Sandoval in his Coral Gables, Florida studio earlier this month. The Miami Herald was there to cover the session as part of a feature on Sandoval and his mission to elevate jazz in Miami. The article opens with picturesque description: “Arturo Sandoval is a big man. Makes a big sound on the trumpet, big gestures, big talent, big cigar in his mouth whenever he’s not playing the trumpet. But it doesn’t slow him down. Right now, he’s dancing, rolling his hips—arms pumping, feet buoyed by the silky voice of 18-year old Dana Lauren, a student from New England Conservatory who Sandoval met at the Newport Jazz Festival and invited to record in the tiny studio of his sprawling Coral Gables home… ‘Yeahhhh,’ Sandoval hisses delightedly. ‘She don’t push, don’t pretend, she feels like a natural singer.’”
NEC Piano Faculty Chair Bruce Brubaker’s latest CD, Hope Street Tunnel Blues, has been garnering praise from all over. Joshua Kosman in SFGate.com called him a “superb interpreter of Philip Glass’s piano music, with performances whose subtlety and responsiveness bring out qualities that go unnoticed in the composer’s own renditions. On this disc, he works that magic once again.” However, Kosman adds, even better than the four Glass works are the two works by Alvin Curran. “Brubaker pries out the structural underpinnings and rhetorical grandeur of Curran’s broad, grandly repetitive canvases. He has the sorcerer’s touch.”
Sumptuous contralto Claudia Huckle ’05 will travel with Placido Domingo and the Washington National Opera’s Young Artists program to Monaco to perform with the Monaco Opera Company for the month of February 2008. She will sing Zerlina in two performances of Don Giovanni.