VOICES OF VIENNA and Penthesilea received great international recognition, as did his first feature film My Brother the Conductor by Alberto Venzago, which was shown in cinemas across Europe.
In addition to his work as a conductor, Mario Venzago has in recent years increasingly devoted himself to his passion for composition. In 2021, he premiered his Violin Concerto with Soyoung Yoon and the Bern Symphony Orchestra. Currently, various works, including two operas, are being prepared for publication by Universal Edition.
Claire Huangci
American pianist Claire Huangci captivates audiences with her“ radiant virtuosity, artistic sensitivity, keen interactive sense and subtle auditory dramaturgy”( Salzburger Nachrichten). With an irrepressible curiosity and penchant for unusual repertoire, she proves her versatility with a wide range of repertoire spanning from Bach and Scarlatti via German and Russian
Claire Huangci
romanticism to Bernstein, Amy Beach, and Barber.
She has been a fixture on the concert circuit presenting an unusual breadth of repertoire and also directing various concertos from the piano in the play-direct tradition. Highlights from Claire’ s 2025 – 26 season in the U. S. include her concerto debuts playing Mozart with the Baltimore Symphony and Santa Rosa Symphony, and Chopin with North Carolina Symphony, and her return to Eugene Symphony( Grieg), Columbus( GA) Symphony
( Beethoven), and Fairfax Symphony( Prokofiev).
In solo recitals and with international orchestras, Claire has appeared in some of the most prestigious halls from New York to California, Tokyo, Beijing, and across Europe. A welcome guest of the Lucerne and Rheingau Festivals, Claire’ s esteemed musical partners include conductors Chan, Danzmayr, Francis, Griffiths, Inkinen, Lecce-Chong, Märkl, Meister, Norrington, Ollikainen, Shelley, St. Clair, and Venzago.
Claire’ s newest Alpha Classics solo record release titled MADE IN USA featuring Gershwin, Beach and Barber, received the“ Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik.” This followed a highly acclaimed Mozart concerto album with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg and Howard Griffiths. And a 3-CD box set of Schubert’ s late sonatas, the Drei Klavierstücke and a selection of songs from Schwanengesang with baritone Thomas E. Bauer was released at her 10-year anniversary at Berlin Classics in the fall of 2023.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller
Anna Clyne
Born March 9, 1980 in London, England Resides in Gardiner, New York
MASQUERADE [ 2013 ]
Last Night of the Proms Concerts in London are about as close as the classicalmusic world gets to Halloween or Mardi gras. BBC Radio 3 invited Anna Clyne to write Masquerade as a short opener for the Last Night in 2013. She is a native of London, although she has lived elsewhere for much of her career: in Scotland for her schooling at the University of Edinburgh, then in the United States, where she earned a master’ s degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music.
She served as Composer in Residence for the Chicago Symphony, Baltimore Symphony( in 2015 – 16), Orchestre national d’ Île-de-France, Philharmonia Orchestra( London), Trondheim( Norway) Symphony, Helsinki Symphony, and, in 2024 – 25, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
In Masquerade, Clyne reached back to her roots as a Londoner— and, indeed, to London merry-making of the mid-18 th century, when some of the city’ s parks and gardens became money-making ventures, charging an admission fee that allowed visitors to stroll about, enjoy refreshments, and listen to music played and sung from bandstands and other pavilions. Vauxhall, Marylebone, and Ranelagh were the most famous of these 18 th century“ pleasure gardens,” but more than 500 of them made up the industry from about 1635
through the Victorian era. Clyne sets out to evoke this distant world by incorporating a popular melody from the period.“ For the main theme,” she says,“ I imagined a chorus welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world. The second theme,“ Juice of Barley,” is an old English country dance melody and drinking song which first appeared in John Playford’ s 1695 edition of The English Dancing Master.” Overall, though, the work does not aim to be antiquarian or precious in its gentility, veering instead in the direction of the rowdy celebrations of modern-day“ Prommers.”
Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,
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