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This Sunday, January 12th at 2:30pm at St. Andrews River Heights United Church, Virtuosi Concerts will be presenting their 4th concert of the 2024-25 season.
Called The Roots and Branches Mentorship Project, this concert pairs up pre-professional musicians with seasoned pros to collaborate in a professional concert setting.
This year's young up-and-coming musicians are soprano Christina Thanisch-Smith, violinist Miona Milovanović, and cellist Déverson Correia. The community professional players for this concert are violist, and Virtuosi Executive Director Jennifer Thiessen and pianist Laura Loewen.
This is going to be a fantastic concert that features music from such composers as Brahms, Richard Strauss, Caroline Shaw, and Karen Sunabacka, to name just a few.
The Roots and Branches concert this year draws heavily on the young artists' origins and the musical seeds that helped them to flourish into musicians. Jennifer Thiessen is the Artistic Producer for Virtuosi and is also a violist who will be performing on this concert as a mentor. As she explains, “It’ s a collaborative effort. We take the roots and branches metaphor very seriously. It’s not only emerging artists and professionals. It also brings in each musician’s roots, whether that's family roots or personal roots, or musical experiences. Everybody who is involved in this new ensemble, that gets created for the concert, contributes to the programming.”
The diversity for this upcoming concert is a result of two of the musicians coming from other parts of the world.
Miona Milovanović is originally from Serbia. She is a recent graduate from the University of Manitoba's Desautels Faculty of music, where she was as student of Oleg Pokhanovski. Her musical selections were drawn from her Serbian roots.
The group will be performing Serbian composer Dragana Jovanović’s incredibly fun piece Tango Dzango for piano trio. They will also be performing music of the Canadian-Serbian composer Ana Sokolovic; her piece Chant for violin and piano.
Déverson Correia is from Brazil. He is a student at the University of Manitoba’s Desautels faculty of music, where he studies with Minna Rose Chung.
Déverson chose some music that is inspired by the sounds of Brazil. The group will be performing Clarice Assad’s piece Fixation from her larger work called Confessions for soprano and piano trio. They will also be playing music written by André Mehmari; his Suite Brasileira for cello and piano.
Soprano Christian Thanisch-Smith has chosen music by Richard Strauss, and Hector Berlioz. As Thiessen explains, “The music is more from the standard repertoire. For her [Thanisch-Smith] they are formative, influential works that she loves and feels at home within her voice. So, there is a personal connection there as well.”
There is also music on the program by Brahms that has a close association for mentors for this concert Jennifer Theissen and pianist Laura Loewen. The group will be performing the first movement of Brahms’ 2nd Piano Quartet in A. op. 26. As Thiessen says, “This is a piece Laura is in love with. For myself, I have a musical memory of Brahms’ piano quartets, because the first piece I ever played on viola when I was switching from violin to viola in university, was a Brahms piano quartet. I was chatting with Laura, and she was head over heels for this movement.”
The variety of excellent music for this concert is certainly diverse. If the concert were a garden, that garden would be extremely colorful and wonderfully fragrant. For the performers, the opportunity to perform this music is a celebration. As Correia says, “I just hope to have a lot of fun with this group. It has been a pleasure to work with all of them. It’s really been a fantastic opportunity. My goal is to have fun and bring joy to the audience.”
The Roots and Branches Mentorship Project as presented by Virtuosi, is a marvelous initiative. This is going to be a fabulous concert that should not be missed. A wonderful way to soak up some musical sunshine on a January afternoon in Winnipeg.
The Roots and Branches concert happens this Sunday, January 12th at 2:30pm at St. Andrews River Heights United Church.
Jennifer Thiessen, Miona Milovanović, and Déverson Correia discuss the Roots and Branches Concert