Ari Livne is a classically trained pianist, actor, and versatile performer based in New York City, who loves to tell stories with and about music. Ari cares deeply about creating a warm, welcoming environment for audiences. Whether his concerts center around a single composer, a theme, or a moment in history, he always provides a unifying principle that the audience can settle into. Some performances delve deeply into the repertoire of a single composer: he performed the complete Rachmaninoff Etudes Tableaux in Elebash Hall and presented a lecture-recital on the Goldberg Variations at the Bridenthal Concert Series. Others focus on new music: he has premiered new works by the composer Cyrus Von Hochstetter and performed the American premiers of works by Peter Maxwell Davies and Volodymyr Runchak, the latter at the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in 2020.
Ari is also an avid collaborator and chamber musician. He recently completed a second tour of Japan with violinist Sho Omagari, performing in nine cities and doing outreach concerts at more than twenty schools and hospitals. He has appeared twice with the Aurea Ensemble in Providence, RI. His duo with cellist Clare Monfredo has spent two summers at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute and performed interactive recitals in New York, NY; Ellsworth, ME; Hudson, NY; and Philadelphia, PA.
He also recently presented programs centered around Schoenberg’s Book of Hanging Gardens and Faure’s La chanson d’Ève with mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis in Brooklyn, NY and Concord, NH. Ari holds degrees from Yale University and The Juilliard School. He has studied acting with John Anthony and Eric Tucker, singing with Kayla Green, and more recently discovered the joy of clown school with Christopher Bayes.
What do we hear when a great composer writes amidst loss and decline? In this intimate concert-portrait, pianist Ari Livne pairs Brahms’s late piano miniatures (Opuses 116–119) with brief spoken vignettes that illuminate the composer’s daily routines, letters, friendships, and frustrations. Moving through tenderness and turbulence, the program penetrates Brahms’s public legend to reveal the private human being - one navigating loss, love remembered, and the stubborn comedy of daily life. Come spend an evening in close company with Brahms. You may never hear him the same way again.
arilivne.com; @arilivne