For this year’s Fête de la Cité, the resident musicians will present as their final Rendez-Vous Musical, a program featuring the Notre Dame Cathedral. Musical selections will be paired with readings that highlight significance of the building.
Free entry.
Program
Eric Whitacre (1970-)
Lux Aurumque
Resident Musicians
Morten Lauridsen (1943-)
Magnum Mysterium
Resident Musicians
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611)
Magnum Mysterium
Resident Musicians
Paul Taffanel (1844–1908)
Grande Fantasie sur Mignon for flute and piano (1874)
Thomaz Tavares Paes, flute & Qiaochu Li, piano
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Duo for violin and cello (1918)
III. Lent
IV. Vif
Nicole León, violin & Andrew Briggs, cello
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
Etude Op.10, No.4
Qiaochu Li, piano
W.A. Mozart (1756-1791)
Sonate K. 330
II. Andante cantabile
Qiaochu Li, piano
Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013)
Sonate: Choral and Variations
Qiaochu Li, piano
Narcís Bonet (1933-2019)
El Desembre Congelat
Sergio Herrera, guitar
Pablo Casals (1876-1973)
Chant des Oiseaux
Andrew Briggs, cello
The Musicians
Originally from Colorado, Andrew Briggs completed a master’s degree in cello performance at the prestigious Juilliard School. Open to all genres, he performs Baroque to contemporary style, and has had the opportunity to practice his talents internationally. Andrew has been a featured soloist at the Aspen Music Festival, the Amsterdam Cello Biennale, and the Holland Music Sessions; an Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; a member of Axiom Contemporary Ensemble, the Madison Bach Musicians, and the Colorado Symphony; and a guest artist at music series in Chicago, New York, and Paris. Andrew is a recipient of the 2018-2019 Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship.
Sergio Herrera is a composer-guitarist currently based in Paris. He received his B.M. in Music composition and theory from Florida State University where he studied composition with Dr. Clifton Callender and jazz theory and arranging with Bill Peterson. During his time at Florida State, Sergio was a recipient of both the Presser Scholarship and the David Ward-Steinman undergraduate composition award. He has written for a wide variety of ensembles ranging from chamber to jazz big band. Distinguished by an ever evolving rhythmic vitality, Sergio’s music synthesizes elements of jazz and Latin-American music to create a uniquely personal compositional voice. Sergio has attended festivals such as the TALIS Music Festival in Switzerland and the EAMA Nadia Boulanger Academy in Paris where he worked with composers Miguel del Aguila and David Conte. Sergio was granted the Fondation des Etats-Unis Harriet Hale Woolley scholarship for the 2018-2019 academic year. He is currently studying harmony, composition, and musical interpretation with Narcis Bonet at the Schola Cantorum de Paris.
Clarinetist Elias Rodriguez made his national solo debut at the age of 16, after performing on a live broadcast of NPR’s « From the Top. » He has since appeared in international music festivals throughout the Americas and Europe, from the Grafenegg Festival in Austria to teaching masterclasses in Cali, Colombia. He is an alumnus of the New York based ensemble, «The Orchestra Now,» with which he has performed as a soloist on New York public radio, recorded a CD on Hyperion Records, and played a concert series at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City. Elias was awarded the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship and an artist residency at the Fondation Des États-Unis.
Thomaz Tavares Paes has been praised by the Virginia Gazette as having a “pure, direct sound, never wavering from the mission at hand and embracing the work’s lyrical and virtuoso demands.” A native New Yorker with Brazilian heritage, Thomaz Tavares completed his Bachelor’s degree in flute performance at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music under the tutelage of Thomas Robertello and is currently pursuing his diploma of superior execution at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris under the tutelage of international soloist Jean Ferrandis.
Guest Musicians
Violinist Nicole León has performed in concert halls throughout the United States and France, such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Salle Pleyel, Salle Cortot and the Philharmonie de Paris. She has also performed at prestigious music festivals such as the Perlman Music Program, the Aspen Music Festival, Music at Menlo, and the Fontainebleau Festival in France. Nicole holds degrees from the Juilliard School, where she was a student of Itzhak Perlman, and an Artist Diploma from the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP). During her studies, Nicole embarked on a three-year interdisciplinary project with the conservatory’s dance department to explore the link between music and dance. Nicole also recorded the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Paris Conservatory’s Laureate Orchestra. In 2016, Nicole won a tutti position with the Paris Chamber Orchestra.
In 2006, Qiaochu Li won the first prize at the Lisma International Music Competition in New York, and then came to France for studies at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. She graduated with a Comcertiste Diploma in Françoise Thinat’s class. In the process, she won the first prize at the « Les Clés d’or » Competition, the Gold Medal with unanimous congratulations from Lagny-sur-Marne’s « Rencontres du Piano », the « Prix d’honneur d’excellence » at International competition Leopold Bellan (chamber music) in Trio, etc. She continued her studies in Germany and got her arts diploma at the University of the Arts in Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin) in the class of Jacques Rouvier. After having perfected herself at the CRR in Paris in the classes of Ariane Jacob, Phillippe Biros and Jean-Marie Cottet, she was admitted in 2013 to the National Conservatory of Music of Paris in the class of Jean-Frédéric Neuburger and is currently following the singing direction classes with Erika Guiomar and vocal accompaniment with Anne Le Bozec.
In Collaboration With
Jacob Henry Leveton studies Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at Northwestern University and was a resident at Fondation des États-Unis during his time as a Critical Theory Fellow in Paris in 2015-2017. His research and teaching concern how artists have addressed architecture and infrastructure associated with climate change. Leveton’s essays on the artist and poet William Blake have appeared in William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (Princeton University Press, 2017) and the Autumn 2018 issue of Essays in Romanticism.
Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert, a former FEU resident, holds master’s in lettres modernes, pensée contemporaine at Paris Diderot, and he will be starting work on a doctorate in the fall. His verse has appeared in Belleville Park Pages, FORTH Magazine, & parentheses. He is the recipient of the 2018 Ohioana Library Association Martin Rumsey Marvin Grant for writers under 30 who have yet to publish a book. Since September 2016 he has been gathering testimonies of the influence of literature on readers in France during conversations they have over dinners he cooks in their homes as part of an ongoing investigation on reading as experience: Pourquoi lisons-nous. As part of this project, and in partnership with La Fondation des États-Unis and La Bibliothèque de Paris Diderot he has organised a cycle of forums around different reading practices as a way to up public spaces around the influence and accompaniment of reading.