 and Monica Huisman (Supplied).png)
This Sunday, February 2nd at 2pm at the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Concert Hall sopranos, Monica Huisman, and Tracy Dahl, cellist Minna Rose Chung and pianist Laura Loewen will take to the stage to perform music of Dvorak, Strauss, Mozart, and others in a concert called Grit and Grace.
Having returned from their Atlantic Coast tour, this concert on Sunday is very much a homecoming and promises to be a concert that will be both evocative and transformative.
These four wonderful musicians earlier this year travelled to and performed at Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia, Mount Allison University in Sackville New Brunswick, and Memorial University in St. John’s Newfoundland. As pianist Laura Loewen says, “Winnipeg is a fantastic place, and our faculty is really, really fantastic, and part of our mandate is to make sure that we get to know other people at other Universities, and they get to know what we are doing here. We go out and visit universities and do concerts and masterclasses so they can get to know us, especially for the students who are thinking about doing a master's degree.”
The quartet originally started as a collaboration between the University of Manitoba and a cello festival in Brazil called The Rio International Cello Encounter. Loewe, Huisman and Chung had all been invited to Brazil to teach and perform, and when the trio returned to Winnipeg, Tracy Dahl made the group a quartet.
At the Grit and Grace concert this Sunday, the variety of music highlighted will run the gamut. There will really be something for everyone. Dvořák’s heavenly Song to the Moon from Rusalka will be performed, as well as songs by Richard Strauss, and arias by Mozart, but also music that is a little bit more off the beaten path. Music by Amy Beach, John Greer, Andre Previn, Tom Cipullo, and others will be performed.
At the end of the concert there will be a Q and A session that will talk about putting together a tour. As Lowen explains, "A lot of our students wonder how we put something like this together... ‘how do you plan this...how do you travel so much.’ We hope that all of them are doing this. A lot of our students go on after they graduate, and they create little indie opera groups. They are doing some really exciting work. And so, we thought they would be interested in a Q and A for us to talk about what we did and for them to share some of their ideas too.”
The Grit and Grace concert on Sunday, February 2nd at the Desautels Concert Hall is sure to be outstanding.