On Friday April 29th, 2011, at New York City’s Cornelia Street Café, Music/Words will feature Inna Faliks, piano, Sharan Leventhal, violin; and Susan Miller and LB Thompson, poets. The varied program will include Schubert’s Sonata in a minor opus 143, Concert Piece (1959) by Seymour Shifrin (1926-1979), and Ravel’s Sonata for violin and piano. Cornelia Street Café is located at 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, NYC. Tickets are $20 and are available by calling 212-989-9319.
Since winning the Kranischsteiner Musikpreis at the 1984 International Contemporary Music Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, violinist Sharan Leventhal has built an international reputation as a champion of contemporary music. Her more than 100 premieres include works written by Gunther Schuller, Virgil Thomson, William Kraft, Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, and Simon Bainbridge.
LB Thompson’s poetry chapbook Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money won the Center for Book Arts’ annual chapbook competition in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Pool, Lyric, The Women’s Review of Books and The New Yorker. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University and was a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her essay about her long period of illness, “Torpor: Metaphors of Hibernation,” appeared in Prairie Schooner in 2009. Ms. Thompson teaches English to college freshmen, works as a free-lance copyeditor and lives on the North Fork of Long Island. She recently completed a poetry manuscript entitled The Dark Skirt of the Universe, and is at work on a novel and a collection of essays.
Susan L. Miller has published poetry in Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Calyx, Commonweal, Meridian, and Sewanee Theological Review, and has poems forthcoming in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality. She has twice won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for poetry. She teaches Poetry and Expository Writing as a Russell Teaching Fellow at Rutgers University, where she also helps coordinate and curate an LGBT reading series and a reading series of religious writing. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.
Called “A delight to hear” and “riveting” by Phil Greenfield of the Baltimore Sun, Inna Faliks (www.innaonline.com) played her debut with the Chicago Symphony at age 15, and performs regularly at major venues in US and abroad. A winner of many international competitions including the 2005 International Pro Musicis Award , Ms. Faliks has recently performed at Carnegie Hall, Paris’s Salle Cortot, Metropolitan Museum, Bargemusic a recital tour of Russia, and in multiple TV and radio broadcasts worldwide. Her CD, Sound of Verse, has been enthusiastically reviewed this year by Gramophone, American Record Guide and other press. Recent festival appearances include Verbier, Taos, and Brevard. She performed the NY and LA premieres of 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg – variations by contemporary composers on Bach’s Aria. Her former teachers include Gil Kalish, Leon Fleisher and Boris Petrushansky.