'Jewish Voices' Concert Comes to the Norton Museum of Art Tonight

Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach Artistic Director and renowned violinist Arnaud Sussmann is joined by pianist Michael Brown for a concert entitled "Jewish Voices" on Tuesday, March 29 at 7 p.m. at the Norton Museum of Art. Tickets are $40 ($30 for museum members) and can be purchased via norton.org. This program is made possible with support from the Gayle and Paul Gross Education Endowment Fund.

March 29 Program

Erwin Schulhoff, Suite for Violin and Piano

Robert Dauber, Serenade (1942)

Pavel Haas, Suite for Oboe and Piano (Arr. for violin and piano)

Samuel Adler, Lullaby (based on an old Hebrew folk tune)

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes

ABOUT THE PROGRAM:

"Jewish Voices" is a deeply personal tribute to Sussmann's grandfather Jacques Sussmann, who was a survivor of the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The program was drawn from the younger Sussmann's desire to learn and perform works by composers whose lives and careers were forever changed due to World War II.

The program includes works by Czech composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), whose successful career was cut short due to the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, and who died during his political imprisonment in Wülzburg in 1942; Robert Dauber (1922-1945), a Viennese-born composer who notably performed the cello part in the opera Brundibár at Theresienstadt (Terezín) and whose life was taken at Dachau in 1945; Leoš Janáček protégé Pavel Haas (1899-1944), who was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944; Samuel Adler (b.1928), whose body of over 400 compositions was written after his family fled Germany to the United States in 1939; and Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996), who fled Warsaw in 1939 for the Soviet Union, where he remained until his death in 1996.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Arnaud Sussmann has distinguished himself with his unique sound, bravura, and profound musicianship. Minnesota's Pioneer Press writes, "Sussmann has an old-school sound reminiscent of what you'll hear on vintage recordings by Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler, a rare combination of sweet and smooth that can hypnotize a listener." A thrilling musician capturing the attention of classical critics and audiences around the world, he has recently appeared as a soloist with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, the Vancouver Symphony, and the New World Symphony. As a chamber musician, he has performed at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, London's Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, the White Nights Festival in Saint Petersburg, the Dresden Music Festival in Germany, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He has been presented in recital in Omaha on the Tuesday Musical Club series, New Orleans by the Friends of Music and at the Louvre Museum in Paris. He has also given concerts at the OK Mozart, Moritzburg, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, Seattle Chamber Music, Chamber Music Northwest, and the Moab Music festivals. Mr. Sussmann has performed with many of today's leading artists including Itzhak Perlman, Menahem Pressler, Gary Hoffman, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Wu Han, David Finckel and Jan Vogler.

Michael Brown has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers." His artistry is shaped by his creative voice as a pianist and composer, praised for his "fearless performances" (The New York Times) and "exceptionally beautiful" compositions (The Washington Post). Winner of a 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an alum of CMS's Bowers Program. He makes regular appearances with orchestras such as The National Philharmonic, the Seattle, Grand Rapids, North Carolina, and Albany symphonies, and was selected by pianist András Schiff to perform an international solo recital tour, making debuts in Zurich's Tonhalle and New York's 92nd Street Y. He has appeared at the Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Marlboro, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Tippet Rise, Gilmore, Bridgehampton, and Bard music festivals and performs regularly with his longtime duo partner, cellist Nicholas Canellakis. A prolific composer, he performed his Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020) with the Kalamazoo, Maryland, and Wichita symphony orchestras. He was the composer and artist-in-residence at the New Haven Symphony for the 2017-19 seasons and a 2018 Copland House Award winner. He is the First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild competition and earned degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. A native New Yorker, he lives there with his two 19th-century Steinway D's, Octavia and Daria.