At 8.30pm, at the Castello dei Cavalieri di Malta in Magione, it will be the turn of Bryan Cheng on cello and Naoko Sonoda on piano.
The programme:
Ludwig van Beethoven
7 Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen”, WoO 46
Johannes Brahms
Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38
Robert Schumann
3 Fantasiestücke for cello and piano, Op. 73
Sergei Prokofiev
Cello Sonata in C major, Op. 119
Bryan Cheng
Winner of the 2nd Prize and the Audience Prize at the prestigious Geneva International Music Competition (2021), Canadian cellist Bryan Cheng (born 1997) made his recital debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of 14, appeared at the Elbphilharmonie in 2018 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and will give his ›Debüt im Deutschlandfunk Kultur‹ in the 2022-23 season, performing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin at the Berlin Philharmonie.
His recent and upcoming engagements include his debut at the Musical Olympus Festival with the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, the Festival de Lanaudière with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, engagements with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande at the Victoria Hall, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Panamá, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Wiener Stadtorchester, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim, and the symphony orchestras of Winnipeg, Springfield (MO), Kingston, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Okanagan, Niagara, Lahti and Schleswig-Holstein; a coast-to-coast Canadian tour with the National Youth Orchestra as winner of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Michael Measures Prize; and a residency with the Orchestra of the Americas. Bryan has worked with renowned conductors including Jonathan Darlington, Jacques Lacombe, Susanna Mälkki, Peter Oundjian, Matthias Pintscher, Dalia Stasevska and Joshua Weilerstein.
As cellist of the Cheng Duo and as a chamber musician, Bryan performs extensively around the world. He has had the privilege of working with partners such as Christian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt and Antje Weithaas. During the 2021-22 season he gives recitals in Dresden (Frauenkirche), Hamburg, Brussels (Flagey), Paris, London, Berlin, Geneva, Lyon, San Diego, New York, Toronto, Edmonton and South Africa, as well as at Quebec’s Orford Musique, the Heidelberger Frühling Festival in Germany, the Transsiberian Art Festival in Russia, and the Trasimeno Music Festival in Italy, in recital with pianist Angela Hewitt. He has released a trilogy of albums for the German label ‘audite’ — Russian Legends (2019), Violonchelo del fuego (2018) and Violoncelle français (2016) — earning excellent reviews from The Times (UK), Süddeutsche Zeitung, ORF Radio (Austria), WCRB Classical Radio Boston and BBC Radio Scotland.
Bryan plays the ‘Bonjour’ Stradivarius cello (c. 1696) with a bow by the Frenchman Jean-Dominique Adam (c. 1830), donated by Andrew R. Shaw and generously loaned to him by the Canada Council Musical Instrument Bank, as winner of the first prize in the competition they held in 2018. Bryan’s studies were supported by the Sylva Gelber Music Foundation through generous multi-year scholarships.
Naoko Sonoda
The Japanese pianist is the winner of numerous international piano and chamber music competitions, and her concert career has taken her to perform throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and South America, and at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the Verbier Festival.
As a chamber musician she has worked with Santiago Cañón Valencia, Hartmut Rohde, Mark Gothoni, Danjulo Ishizaka, Jens-Peter Maintz and Andrei Ionita. She has performed with renowned orchestras such as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and in venues such as the Berliner Philharmonie in Germany, the Mariinsky Theatre Concert Hall in St Petersburg, the Teatro Mayor in Bogotá and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Naoko Sonoda is much in demand as a collaborative pianist; she has received awards as best accompanist at the Markneukirchen International Music Competition (2013, 2019), the Lutosławski International Cello Competition in Warsaw (2015, 2018) and the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition (2015, 2019). Her performances are regularly broadcast on international radio and TV, including Kulturradio RBB, ZDF and BR in Germany, NPO Radio 4 in the Netherlands, Radio Romania, NHK-FM in Japan and the BBC. Naoko Sonoda studied with Yoko Okumura, Seiko Ezawa and Mikhail Voskresensky at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, before studying at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Rainer Becker. She has also studied chamber music with Tabea Zimmermann, Markus Nyikos and Natalia Gutman, and has taken masterclasses with Hans Leygraf, Ferenc Rados, Klaus Hellwig, Pascal Devoyon and Jacques Rouvier. After graduating, Naoko was engaged as a collaborative pianist by the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Hochschule für Musik Hanns-Eisler Berlin and the Franz Liszt Musikhochschule Weimar.
