Greg Stepanich

Emerson, Licitra, new American music

A quick entry about three concerts coming up in the next couple weeks:

First, Ernie Berlin's Treasure Coast Concert Association is presenting an impressive series of events up at Stuart's Lyric Theatre, a nice old hall in a nifty little city. Downtown Osceola Street up there reminds of me a smaller Las Olas Boulevard, but a little funkier and more human-scale.

Ernie is a retired American Express vice president who used to play the saxophone as a younger man, and who has for years been mounting classical music concerts in Martin County. He's been important in helping launch the careers of current rising stars such as The Five Browns and violinist Shunsuke Sato, and this year he's offered A-list stars such as Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell and Garrick Ohlsson.

He wrote last week to remind me about two of his upcoming concerts: the Emerson Quartet, which appears Thursday at the Lyric in a program of quartets by Mendelssohn (No. 3 in D, Op. 44, No. 1, one of my favorites) and Shostakovich (No. 8, his most well-known). Also, pianist Wu Han, who appeared here last month with her husband, David Finckel, the Emerson's cellist, will join the quartet for one of Dvorak's best chamber works, the A major Piano Quintet, Op. 81.

And on Saturday, April 1, the association presents one of the world's rising tenors, Salvatore Licitra. The program hasn't been announced yet, but Licitra is making a return appearance in Stuart. I heard him in the Met's broadcast of La Forza del Destino a couple weekends ago, and while I'm not certain he was singing at his best, it's an inviting, attractive voice, and I hope to catch the concert.

Also up this Thursday is another evening of contemporary music at Palm Beach Atlantic University. The husband-wife piano duo of Estibaliz Gastesi and Marcio Bezerra will be playing a series of new works by PBAU's Tim Thompson and Marlene Woodward-Cooper, as well as music by Justin Rubin and Thomas Wegren, who teach at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and Terry Winter Owens.

The duo is playing three works by Owens, a New York-based composer and pianist and devotee of work of the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. You can hear some of her music here at her Web site.

The season is about to reach its peak, and here's a chance to hear some top stars in a lovely setting, and a rare opportunity to hear an evening devoted to contemporary American music, much of it new.