Celebrating Richard Danielpour

Grammy-Award winning composer Richard Danielpour has established himself as one of the most gifted and sought-after composers of his generation. His music has attracted an international and illustrious array of champions, and, as a devoted mentor and educator, he has also had a significant impact on the younger generation of composers over the past 30 years. His list of commissions include some of the most celebrated artists of our day including Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Susan Graham, Dawn Upshaw, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Gary Graffman, Anthony McGill, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets, the New York City, Pacific Northwest and Nashville Ballets, and institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Maryinsky Orchestra, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and many more. With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Danielpour created Margaret Garner, his first opera, which premiered in 2005 and had a second production with New York City Opera. He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Award, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and The Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He served on the composition faculty of Manhattan School of Music from 1993 to 2017. In 2017, Danielpour relocated to Los Angeles where he accepted the position of Professor of Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is also a member of the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music where he has taught since 1997.

In April 2019, JoAnn Faletta lead the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in performances of The Passion of Yeshua, where it was recorded by Naxos. The album was released in March of 2020 to critical acclaim and was nominated for three GRAMMYs in 2021, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition; it won a GRAMMY in the category of Best Choral Performance. In 2019, Danielpour composed five works, the most significant of them being A Standing Witness, a series of 14 songs which are settings of poems written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove. Composed for mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and Music from Copland House, this 70-minute monodrama which remembers the last 50 years of our American history was premiered at the University of Chicago in October 2021 and later received performances at the Kennedy Center and at Tanglewood.

In 2020, The Oregon Bach Festival commissioned Danielpour to compose An American Mosaic as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was also written to pay homage to the heroes of this crisis. Pianist Simone Dinnerstein gave a livestreamed premiere via YouTube and the corresponding album release through Supertrain Records in March 2021 garnered immediate critical acclaim while receiving over 3,000,000 streams on Apple Music alone and was recently nominated for a GRAMMY for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

In 2021, Danielpour was commissioned by Orchestra Della Toscana to write a piece for the Dante anniversary, making him the first American composer in nearly 40 years to be commissioned by a major Italian Orchestra. That same year, clarinetist Anthony McGill premiered Danielpour’s Four Angels with the Catalyst Quartet. The work was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as part of a celebration of Black Lives Mattering in America. In September, he was given a lifetime achievement award from the Cremona Music Festival and later that Fall was awarded the Covel Chair from UCLA to support the composition and production of his new two act opera The Grand Hotel Tartarus, making him only the second recipient of this coveted award.

Upcoming premieres in 2023-24 include The Unhealed Wound, a cantata composed for baritone Eric Owens and mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms. This work, written in collaboration with Rita Dove, was commissioned by Skidmore College as part of a McCormick Residency in September 2023. In October 2023, the ROCO Chamber Orchestra in Houston will premiere the first of two newly commissioned works, Breaking the Veil, which was written as a tribute to the heroic women of Iran. ROCO will also premiere a second commissioned work, Triptych, which is a three-movement symphony based on The Divine Comedy of Dante. In February 2024, The Golden Bridge Chorus, conducted by Suzie Digby, will premiere Danielpour’s Agnus Dei in Los Angeles. On May 17, 2024, Danielpour’s full length opera The Grand Hotel Tartarus will receive its world premiere at the Freud Theater in Los Angeles.

Danielpour is one of the most recorded composers of his generation; many of his recordings can be found on the Naxos of America and Sony Classical labels. Danielpour’s music is published by Lean Kat Music and Associated Music Publishers. For more information about Richard Danielpour, please visit his website at: www.Richard-Danielpour.com

Shahab Paranj is an Iranian composer, instrumentalist, and educator. He is considered a generational pioneer, with a bold compositional style that integrates Persian and Western composition techniques. Paranj holds degrees in music composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (BM), the Manhattan School of Music (MM), and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D.).

Paranj’s recent commissions include works for ensembles including the Russian String Orchestra, Intersection Contemporary Music Ensemble, Long Beach Opera, Aleron Trio, San Francisco New Music Ensemble and Sopraduo. Paranj is also the founder and artistic director of “du vert à l’infini” a contemporary music festival in the Franche Comte region in France. He is also the founder and director of The Iranshahr Orchestra. His original score for the movie “Dressage,” was the winner of the 2018 feature film in the Berlin Film Festival.

Known as a tombak virtuoso, Paranj has performed, recorded, and collaborated with numerous highly respected musicians worldwide. He was a member of the Iran National TV & Radio Symphony Orchestra as a cellist for eight years, and for fourteen years as served as a percussionist for the Shams Ensemble.

Paranj’s research on the complex rhythm of Persian Āvāzi style music was selected to be presented at AMS-SEM-SMT 2023 joint annual meeting in New Orleans, and he has received formal recognition from the Mehr Humanitarian Society (2010) and The City and County of San Francisco (2011) for his contribution to introducing Persian music to the world.

Following his highly-acclaimed performances of the complete three-act version of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Stefan Lano began an extensive collaboration with that theater which spanned from 1993 until 2010 during which period he led notable productions of many staples of twentieth century repertoire. In 2005, at the unanimous behest of the Resident Orchestra of the theater, he was appointed Music Director of the Teatro Colón where he remained until the theater’s closing for renovation in 2008. According to the historic tradition of the theater, only those conductors elected by the orchestra are regarded as Music Director of the Orquésta Estable, his two predecessors having been Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber. He returned in 2010 with a double-bill of his invention combining Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violanta and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie.

Opera engagements in recent seasons have included the Semper Oper Dresden (Hans Werner Henze L’Upupa, Mussorgsky Boris Godunov, Jake Heggie Dead Man Walking) ; Hamburg State Opera (Turandot, Tosca); Göteborg Opera (Tristan und Isolde); National Opera of Slovakia (Boris Godunov, La bohème); Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess in Atlanta and Philadelphia, fifty performances of West Side Story in Aachen and St. Gallen; Lithuanian National Opera & Ballet Theater (Turandot); concert performances of this work with the Singapore Symphony; the first international tour of the Teatro Colón to Mexico City with the Roberto Oswald production of Turandot; and symphonic concerts with the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Montréal, Zagreb, Vilnius, Basel, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Málaga, Tirana, Oulu, Athens, Skopje, Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

His professional career began as Répétiteur at the Graz Opera where he was also solo pianist for the ballet production of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. During his tenure on the Music Staff of the Vienna State Opera during the 1980s, he was solo pianist with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the world-premiere performances of Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto at the Vienna State Opera, Salzburg Festival and Teatro alla Scala Milan conducted by Lorin Maazel who would later appoint him Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1988.

In 1994, he was appointed to the Music Staff of the Metropolitan Opera. His 1997 debut performance at the MET conducting Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress resulted in an engagement at the San Francisco Opera where he conducted a highly lauded rendition of Lotfi Mansouri’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU in 1998. He was immediately re-engaged in 2000 for Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. In 1998, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera to prepare Arnold Schönberg’s Moses und Aron.

The clarity and expressivity of his renditions of twentieth century opera brought him to the attention of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra which contracted him for concert performances of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 2002 for which he was cited with an OPUS Award for Best Concert of the Season by the Conseil Québécois de la Musique. His return to Montréal in 2003 conducting Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle was accorded a second OPUS Award.

An ardent proponent of contemporary music, he presented the world-premiere performances of Richard Danielpour’s opera, Margaret Garner at the theaters of Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Charlotte, NC and Philadelphia as well as Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata at the Houston Grand Opera. In

December of 2015, his world-premiere recording of Joseph Summer’s opera, The Tempest was released by Albany Records in the United States.

He maintains a long-standing collaboration with the Escuela Superior de Música Reína Sofía in Madrid. His renditions of the Symphony N° 14 of Dimitri Shostakovich, Stravinsky’s Firebird (1919), Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Ellinor d’Melón in concerts at the Auditorio Nacional Madrid were broadcast by Radio-Television España.

In 2017, he again returned to Alban Berg’s LULU at the Deutsches Nationaltheater & Staatskapelle Weimar for which he later composed and conducted the incidental music for a new production of Alfred Döblin’s epic novel, November 1918. During this period, he made his debut at the State Opera in Prague with a new production of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf. Shortly thereafter, he took over on short notice a celebratory gala concert of music by Krzystof Penderecki with the Sinfonia Varsovia in Warsaw.

Upon completion of studies in Composition and Piano at Oberlin Conservatory of Music while concurrently completing a degree in Biology at Oberlin College, he was awarded a full-scholarship as Teaching Fellow at Harvard University from which he holds a PhD in Composition.

A scholarship award in 1977 from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) afforded him further composition studies with Isang Yun, composing his Sinfonie Nr. 2 Grodek while concurrently studying in the conducting class of Prof. Hans Martin Rabenstein at the HdK Berlin. Italian composer and conductor, Gianfranco Masini whom he met when playing a production of Verdi’s Nabucco in Graz was later a seminal influence on his future development.

Stefan Lano’s Sinfonie N° 3 EIKASIA was premiered in 2004 by the Lithuanian National Philharmonic with the composer conducting. His Sinfonie N° 1 Aus Märchenzeit was cited with a BMI Award in Composition and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant from the American Music Center for its first performance at the 1976 Newport Music Festival. Antal Dorati also chose this work for First Prize of the National Society of Arts and Letters Firestone Award in Composition in Washington DC.

Having conducted the world-premiere of his his Sieben Lieder nach Rainer Maria Rilkefor soprano and orchestra with the National Symphony of Argentina in Buenos Aires in 2019, his recently completed Piano Concerto N° 2 will be premiered in November 2025 by the National Philharmonic of Lithuania with Lithuanian star pianist, Muza Rubackyte as soloist. He recently conducted a highly lauded concert commemorating 70 years of the Orchestra of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and a new production of Richard Strauss’ ELEKTRA at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

His music is published by Musikverlag Ries & Erler in Berlin.

With a “wondrous voice, which gleams in all registers” (Gramophone), she brings emotionally-charged fearlessness, unique expressivity, and mesmerizing drama to her performances in opera, concert, film, or theater.

Growing up in her native Jerusalem as the daughter of a Hebrew University botany professor and a musicologist mother, she was immersed in music from a young age and developed a love of all genres. In addition to her performances of traditional repertory, she has been called “a composer’s dream” (Star Tribune, MN), and is widely-recognized as one of today’s foremost interpreters of contemporary music. She has partnered with diverse array of composers, regularly premiering or featuring new works, such as the staged version of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels; Emmy Award-winner Jeff Beal’s The Paper Lined Shack, Andrea Clearfield’s The Long Bright, Pulitzer and Grammy Award-winner Aaron Jay Kernis’ Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Wing on Wing, numerous works by Grammy- and Oscar-winning John Corigliano, and music by Xiaogang YE, Paola Prestini, Danaë Vlasse, and dozens of others.

Only one year after graduating from Juilliard, she gave her first World Premiere – and on only two weeks’ notice – with the New York Philharmonic, in Pulitzer Prize-winner David Del Tredici’s The Spider and the Fly. Since then, her appearances as soloist traverse the globe, and have included the Los Angeles, New York, and Israel Philharmonics, Chicago, Boston, London, BBC, National, St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, Hamburg, Stockholm, and Melbourne Symphonies, Minnesota Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She collaborated with some of the world’s foremost conductors, such as Leonard Slatkin, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kurt Masur, Marin Alsop, Thomas Adès, Giancarlo Guerrero, and Robert Spano.

She can also be heard as the featured vocal soloist on the feature-film soundtracks for The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Hail Caesar, and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Her discography includes Oscar-winner John Corigliano’s song-cycle Mr. Tambourine Man (for which she won the Grammy for “Best Classical Vocal Performance”), Andrea Clearfield’s Women of Valor with Tovah Feldshuh, Richard Danielpour’s Toward a Season of Peace and the Grammy Award-winning Passion of Yeshua, Eric Whitacre’s Good Night Moon, and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, among many others.

Hilá’s opera performances began at the age of 14, in the role of Flora in Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw at the Israeli Opera. She continues to perform with companies across the U.S., including notable roles as Mrs. Clayton in Stephen Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Yan in Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus, Cecily in Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and an alien (with her “stratospherically supernatural coloratura” – Los Angeles Times) in Yuval Sharon and Annie Gosfield’s War of the Worlds.

Having received the coveted Sony ES Prize for her outstanding contribution to the vocal arts, she brings her “superb voice with an expressive range and communicative power” (Chicago Tribune) not only to traditional recital, orchestral, and operatic repertory, but also to boundary-pushing projects in jazz, film, theater, and world music. With prolific jazz guitarist Shea Welsh and tabla virtuoso Aditya Kalyanpur, she recently co-founded Renaissance Heart, a global music project melding classical, jazz, folk, rock, and world music, with which she regularly performs and records.

For her role of Exstasis in Eric Whitacre’s groundbreaking electro-musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena, she was nominated as “Best Actress in a Musical” from the Los Angeles Ovation Awards and the L.A. Ticketholder Awards. She sang, acted, danced, and fought in long martial arts battles nightly for a seven-week sold-out run, a tour-de-force that prompted Theatre Mania to rave that she “fights like a warrior and sings like the angel she portrays.”

Recognized as an innovative and passionate educator, she regularly offers residencies, masterclasses, and workshops on campuses across the U.S. Bringing her diverse pedagogical methods – which include mindfulness, meditation, and energetic components – to a wide variety of sessions, she combines technical focus, tools and approaches for connecting, and a sense of inner confidence, centering, and presence.

Also reflected in Hilá’s work is her love of poetry, focus on discipline (she holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do), and engagement with nature, with which she aims to inspire light, love, beauty, and joy. She hopes her artistic risk-taking emboldens audiences to expand their comfort zones.

Internationally acclaimed as a violist as well as a violinist, the versatile Ida Kavafian is an artist-member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and former violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio. For 34 years she has been artistic director of Music from Angel Fire in New Mexico, where some 200 Curtis students have participated in the Young Artist Program to date. She was a founder of the Bravo! Colorado festival, serving as its artistic director for ten years; and co-founded the chamber ensembles Opus One, Tashi, and Trio Valtorna. She also performs as a soloist and in recital with her sister, violinist Ani Kavafian.

Ms. Kavafian has premiered numerous works, including concertos by Toru Takemitsu and Michael Daugherty, whose Fire and Blood she recorded with the Detroit Symphony. She has toured and recorded with jazz artists Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis, and with fiddler/composer Mark O’Connor.

Born in Istanbul of Armenian parentage, Ms. Kavafian is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where she studied with Oscar Shumsky. She made her debut through Young Concert Artists with the pianist Peter Serkin, and also received the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant. She resides with her husband, violist Steven Tenenbom, in Philadelphia and Connecticut, where they breed and train prizewinning Hungarian vizsla show dogs.

Since 1998 Ms. Kavafian has served on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she received the 2013 Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. She also teaches at the Juilliard School and the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Australian flutist Catherine Gregory, winner of the Pro Musicis International Award, enjoys a dynamic career as a soloist, ensemble player, and teaching artist. Her performances of music old and new have taken her across the globe from Alice Tully Hall in New York, to London’s Milton Court, Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie, and the Sydney Opera House.

Catherine, who first came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar, is a sought-after recitalist and chamber musician, with performances at Carnegie Hall, with the Chamber Music Societies of Lincoln Center and Philadelphia, Camerata Pacifica, Caramoor, Bay Chamber Festival, Við Djúpið Festival in Iceland and the Southern Cross Soloists. She has toured internationally with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and has played numerous cycles as guest principal flute with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.  Catherine is a core-artist of Decoda, the affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, serving as co-artistic director of the group from 2017-2020.

Catherine is deeply passionate about the power of music to forge direct and impactful connections with all communities. Catherine’s current project, Just Breathe, embodies her creative spirit as a commissioner of new music and artist citizen: it is both a performance of new commissions from leading composers such as Clarice Assad, Viet Cuong, Timo Andres and Juhi Bansal, as well as a series of interactive performance workshops for cancer patients, providers and caregivers that explore the intersection of breath and music.

Committed to nurturing the next generation of young artists, Catherine has established herself as an accomplished pedagogue, having served as visiting Flute Lecturer at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and as the flute faculty member for the Decoda Chamber Music Festival and the Emerging Composers Intensive.

Catherine is a faculty member of The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as a lecturer in music, music industry (artistic citizenship and community engagement), and is also the newly appointed director of the Gluck Fellowship Program, leading the UCLA Gluck Fellows in their music ensembles to engage, connect and share live chamber music performances at non-traditional venues all around the city of Los Angeles. Catherine also serves on the faculty of The Colburn School and has given masterclasses and led residencies at leading music schools internationally, from The Tianjin Juilliard School, to Curtis, to the Guildhall School in London. Catherine’s recent album together with pianist David Kaplan, entitled Vent, was released on the Bright Shiny Things label in September 2023.

Renowned performer and teacher, has been the bassoon professor at The University of Texas at Austin since 1995, and is also on the faculty of the International Festival Institute at Round Top and Principal Bassoonist with the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra. In addition she has made a number of acclaimed solo and chamber music recordings.

A reviewer in the American Record Guide said of Ms. Jensen’s solo CD Shadings, “…She has simply turned in the finest-played bassoon recital I have ever heard….She obviously sees tone quality as the foundation for her fluent technique…It is a ravishing sound, siren-like in its attractive flair….Ms. Jensen could teach a lot about musicality to a number of famous violinists….”

Her recent releases include Handel: The “Halle” Sonatas” (2017, Equilibrium label), Modal Cycle – Live from France (2016, Longhorn Label), and …and Kristin Wolfe Jensen, UT Bassoons in Collaboration (2015, Longhorn label). Fanfare Magazine wrote of her 2010 release, Parables and Reflections, bassoon music of Virko Baley, on the TNC label, “Kristen Wolfe Jensen expertly unites the varied facets of Baley’s Parables and Reflections (the CD title) into a consistent interpretative vision, from Treny-Laments II’s haunting depths, which later metamorphose into swift, but still deep, emotional waters; to the impetuous Scherzo I: Kozak Mamai, from Partita No. 2; the extended meditation of the Aria: Tears; or the dreamy Tango (both from the partita). Baley has given her ample opportunity to showcase her virtuosity; she’s unfazed by rapid passages demanding agility and precision, she has mastered the Baroque technique of counterpointing melodious phrases with pedal tones, she alternates effortlessly between themes separated by register to create the illusion that a solo instrument can conduct a dialogue with itself, and she suavely overcomes the potential pitfalls that long-lined legato phrases pose for wind instrumentalists”. Many of her performances appear on her YouTube channel.

Ms. Jensen is Founder and Artistic Director Emerita of the biennial Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition for young women bassoonists from the Americas, providing the largest prizes of any bassoon competition in the world. An esteemed pedagogue, she has given guest recitals and master classes at many major American music schools and her former UT students hold major orchestral positions and university teaching positions around the country. Her extensive online bassoon method, MusicAndTheBassoon.org, provides an innovative, multimedia approach to learning the bassoon.

Formerly, Ms. Jensen served on the faculties of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the University of North Texas. Ms. Jensen has toured Europe with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, served as Acting Principal Bassoonist of the Houston Grand Opera, and has been a member of The Dallas Opera Orchestra, the Richardson Symphony, the Las Vegas Symphony, Jupiter Symphony of New York and Continuum. She has performed solo recitals at several International Double Reed Society conferences, and was co-host of the 2005 conference in Austin. As a student, she won the concerto competitions at the Juilliard School of Music in 1990 where she received her MM, and the Oberlin Conservatory in 1989 as an undergraduate, which led to performances of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto, k. 191.

Named by Musical America as one of classical music’s Top 30 Influencers for 2015 and a Lorée oboe artist in 2019, Texas native, Alecia Lawyer, is the Founder, Artistic Director, and Principal Oboist of ROCO, a professional music ensemble that flexes from 1 to 40 musicians from around the US and Canada, including guest conductors from around the world. Expanding the repertoire, ROCO has commissioned and world premiered over 110 works by living composers. The group performs dozens of concerts annually in multiple venues throughout Houston, all of which are broadcast nationally and live streamed to the world. Known as “The Most Fun You Can Have with Serious Music!” ROCO has been called a trailblazer and arts disrupter and is leading the sector in innovation. Calling her business model “Wildcatting in the Arts”, Ms. Lawyer was named a finalist for Texas Musician of the Year (along with Willie Nelson) and was listed as one of Houston’s Top 50 Most Influential Women. She is a proud senior fellow of American Leadership Forum, a trustee for Episcopal High School and a member of the Institute for Composer Diversity. She has received numerous awards, including the Gutsy Gal Award from Houston Woman Magazine and Sigma Alpha Iota Musician of the Year. She regularly presents her entrepreneurial model and dynamic ideas to conservatories, universities, and music festivals around the US, such as Juilliard, Yale, SMU, Round Top, and the Texas Music Festival, using ROCO as a case study for community-specific orchestra building. Business and social groups in the Greater Houston Area engage her to speak on numerous topics related to the creation, innovation, marketing, and development of the arts. After receiving her Masters from Juilliard and Bachelors from SMU, both in oboe, Alecia’s career has ranged from recording for John Cage and soloing with Rostropovich, to a contemporary chamber music recital at Carnegie Hall, live radio broadcasts in New York, and disc jockeying for KRTS-92.1FM, Houston, TX. Enjoying a year residency in France, she recorded with the Sorbonne Orchestra, performed recitals in Paris, and concertized with various orchestras and chamber groups in France and Germany. Alecia and her husband Larry have two fantastic sons, Jacob, 22 and Zachary, 18