Sunday Serenades: Matinee Performances with Timeless Charm. From the smooth sounds of jazz to the grandeur of Classical Crossovers and Broadway classics, this series invites you to enjoy an afternoon of elegant and exhilarating music.
Grammy award winning violinist, Melissa White of the Harlem Quartet, performs with Miki Sawada, piano, for an afternoon of exquisite repertoire celebrating the close of our Sunday Serenades season. Melissa has enchanted audiences and critics around the world for her “warmly expressive and lyrical … glittering” playing. Her rapid rise as a soloist has captured the attention of orchestras and audiences worldwide. Miki Sawada made The Boston Globe’s list “The classical concerts that made me fall in love with live music again,” is a fearless musician who is taking classical music where others are not....
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Sunday Serenades: Matinee Performances with Timeless Charm. From the smooth sounds of jazz to the grandeur of Classical Crossovers and Broadway classics, this series invites you to enjoy an afternoon of elegant and exhilarating music.
Grammy award winning violinist, Melissa White of the Harlem Quartet, performs with Miki Sawada, piano, for an afternoon of exquisite repertoire celebrating the close of our Sunday Serenades season. Melissa has enchanted audiences and critics around the world for her “warmly expressive and lyrical … glittering” playing. Her rapid rise as a soloist has captured the attention of orchestras and audiences worldwide. Miki Sawada made The Boston Globe’s list “The classical concerts that made me fall in love with live music again,” is a fearless musician who is taking classical music where others are not.
Melissa White
American violinist Melissa White has enchanted audiences and critics around the world for her “warmly expressive and lyrical…glittering” playing (Chicago Classical Review) and for “making her violin sing elegantly” (Aspen Times). Ms. White’s rapid rise as a soloist has captured the attention of orchestras and audiences worldwide, many of whom already know her for her successes as a founding member of the Grammy-winning Harlem Quartet.
A first-prize laureate in the Sphinx Competition, she has performed with such leading U.S. ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Colorado, Detroit, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras. Internationally, she has appeared as soloist with Poland’s Filharmonia Dolnoslaska; with the Colombian Youth Orchestra in a tour of that country; with the Czech National Philharmonic; and as a recitalist in Baku, Azerbaijian, and Jelenia Gora, Poland. Her film credits include a violin solo in the soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s 2019 psychological thriller Us; and in addition to her numerous classical performances she has also performed alongside several pop artists including Pharrell, Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys, and Lauryn Hill.
MIKI Sawada
Pianist Miki Sawada, whose performance made The Boston Globe’s list “Best of the Arts 2021: The classical concerts that made me fall in love with live music again,” is known as a fearless musician who is taking classical music where others are not. Through her signature project Gather Hear Tour , Miki is traveling the country state-by-state with a piano in a van to perform in community gathering spaces instead of concert halls. Miki’s mission is to connect with Americans across socioeconomic and political boundaries through music; Gather Hear attempts to find what unites us as humans in this nation of deep divide.
Miki has been featured at venues and occasions such as: Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, The Arctic Philharmonic (Norway), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (NYC), Roulette (Brooklyn), MATA Festival (NYC), Toronto Summer Music Festival, Music on Main (Vancouver), Chicago Symphony Center’s Macy’s Day of Music, the Banff Centre, New Music New Haven, PianoFest in the Hamptons, Art Base (Belgium), and Moulin d’Andé (France). In the summers, she teaches and performs as a faculty member of Heifetz Institute in Virginia. She has commissioned several solo pieces with support from New Music USA, and in 2021 released her debut album “A Kind of Mirror” featuring music for piano and electronics by composer Brendon Randall-Myers.
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