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Olevsky, Contino to Perform in Benefit Chamber Concert
The department of music and dance will present “Of Friends and Strings,” a special benefit concert featuring professor of piano emerita Estela Olevsky and renowned cellist Adriana Contino on Sunday, Jan. 28 at 4 p.m. in Bezanson Recital Hall.
Admission is free, with donations gratefully accepted to the Julian Olevsky Scholarship, which is given each year to the outstanding violin student in the UMass Amherst music program. Joining Olevsky and Contino will be guest violinist and former Olevsky Scholarship recipient Amanda Stenroos.
Julian Olevsky, the late husband of Estela Olevsky, was a member of the university string faculty from 1967 until his death in 1985. One of the foremost violinists of his generation, he performed widely in North and South America, Europe, the Far East and New Zealand. Many of his former students are teachers and members of distinguished symphony orchestras in the U.S. and Europe. A list of his recently reissued recordings can be found at http://www.doremi.com/Olevsky.html
The Jan. 28 program will include music professor emeritus Robert Stern’s “Elegy,” which was composed in memory of Julian Olevsky in 1986. The concert will also feature Mozart’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major,” KV.301 (cello transcription by A. Contino) excerpts from Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor,” Op. 49, Beethoven’s Variations on “Bei Männern welche Liebe Fühlen” from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Dohnanyi’s “Cello Sonata in B flat major,” Op. 8.
Estela Olevsky was a member of the piano faculty from 1969 until 2009. She has appeared internationally as a soloist and as a chamber music partner with many distinguished instrumental and vocal soloists and chamber music groups such as the Berlin Philharmonic Festival Players, the Lark Quartet and the Bach Festival in Buenos Aires. In the U.S., she has performed in recitals at the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall and Weill Hall.
Contino was the first female principal cellist of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, with which she toured worldwide as soloist. She has worked with conductors including Robert Shaw, Dennis Russell Davies, Lukas Foss, Andre Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas, and her festival performances include Mostly Mozart, European Music, Wolf Trap, Istanbul, Lucerne and Aspen. She was also professor of cello, baroque cello and chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany from 1991 to 2012. Her father, Joseph Contino, was professor of clarinet and a pioneering band director in the music department in the 1950s.
Stenroos holds a bachelor’s degree in performance from the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music and a master’s from UMass Amherst. She has performed in numerous orchestras and festivals and studied with teachers Elizabeth Chang, Julian Ross and Annie Fullard. A lover of Bach, she is co-founder of UMass Amherst’s biennial Bach Festival and Symposium.