PROGRAM

Robert Schumann - Adagio and Allegro in Ab Major Op. 70 (1849)
Felix Mendelssohn - Cello Sonata in D Major Op. 58 (1842)
Frédéric Chopin - Cello Sonata in G minor Op. 65 (1847)

Clare Monfredo - Cello, Ari Livne - Piano

CLARE’S BIO

Clare Monfredo is a cellist and scholar of performance practice. Across fields, her work is motivated by the same underlying question: how are individual voices expressed across art forms? This question guides her approach to performance, research, curation, and teaching.

As a cellist, Clare has performed stylistically wide-ranging music across the United States and Europe, including with Ensemble Intercontemporain, A Far Cry, Lucerne Contemporary Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Heartbeat Opera, and Wet Ink Ensemble; alongside jazz musicians including Ron Carter and Jon Batiste; and in collaboration with artists including Nene Humphrey and Miya Masaoka. She has performed at an array of New York City venues—from Carnegie Hall to Little Island—and across Europe, including in the Paris Philharmonie, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Brussels’ Bozar, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and KKL Luzern. Clare’s festival appearances include Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival (UK), Lucerne Festival (CHE), Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and Kurt Weill Fest (DE).

Her primary mentors include Norman Fischer, Peter Bruns, David Gebor, Julia Lichten, and Natasha Brofsky, as well as masterclasses with Yo-Yo Ma, Jean-Guihen Queyras, and Paolo Pandolfo. Clare received a Doctor of Musical Arts with distinction from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she was the recipient of the Dissertation Fellowship, Provost's Fellowship, and 5 Year Graduate Center Fellowship. She studied in Leipzig, Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship with cellist Peter Bruns, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University, as well as a Master of Music degree from the Shepherd School at Rice University where she studied with Norman Fischer. Her work has been featured in Strad Magazine and Strings Magazine, and her scholarship has been accepted at the Music Theory Society of New York State and Society of Music Theory conferences and the Timbre Conference. Clare currently is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester.

A dedicated chamber musician, Clare is co-founder and co-artistic director of DownEast New Music, Maine's first chamber music ensemble focused exclusively on contemporary music.

ARI’S BIO

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.

arilivne.com; @arilivne claremonfredo.com @cmonfredo.