Geneva Music Festival’s Virtual Season Presents Final Event
Over the course of the past three weeks, the Geneva Music Festival has presented a robust, online program to provide audiences with interactions with world-class musicians and music. The final event of the virtual season takes place tomorrow, Friday, June 26, at 7 p.m. GMF Director Geoffrey Herd will sit down via YouTube with violinist Ani Kavafian to discuss her long and varied career. Kavafian is an artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Professor at the Yale School of Music. She has performed in many of the world’s great concert halls and has soloed with nearly every major orchestra in the United States.
“One work I would love to share is the Babadjanian Piano Trio, which is on YouTube, from a performance at the Chamber Music Society a couple of years ago,” says Kavafian. “This is an incredibly beautiful work by an Armenian composer that I met and played with in Paris. He has since passed away, but I believe this work belongs in the permanent repertory of every piano trio. It is deeply moving, exciting, and is very close to my Armenian heart.”
Kavafian has been active with online teaching during the shutdown and, in between the busy times, has been relaxing at home with her husband Bernard Mindich and their golden doodle puppy, Coco.
Recently, she taught as part of an online course called OnlineSolo Strings Intensive. There were 13 students in a combination of studio classes, master classes, movies and even breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings. “It was quite amazing but kept me very busy every day of the week,” she says.
Her classes at Yale concluded more than a month ago, but she has been giving extra lessons as needed to students preparing for auditions. “At the end of our term, we put together a lovely online video of Bach Air from the 3rd Orchestral Suite. I made the transcription and all of us were involved,” shares Kavafian.
At the end of July and into August, she will be doing more online teaching with the Vivac-e Music Foundation, where again there will be one-on-one lessons, forums and lectures. The faculty will include Kavafian’s sister Ida and her violist husband, Steven Tenenbom, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Axel Strauss, Ara Gregorian and Hye-Jin Kim, among many others.
“I am so very happy to be a part of the Geneva Music Festival family!” says Kavafian, who has presented the Chamber Music Finale for the GMF in the past. “Geoffrey was my student at Yale for a couple of years and I am incredibly proud of him for putting together a first-rate chamber music festival. Although we can’t all be together this year, I do hope there will be many future years of collaboration and wish the festival much success!”
This event will premiere on the Festival’s YouTube channel.