Lectures & Performances

Lectures • Concerts 

Lectures

Soviet Nonconformist Art: A View from the U.S.A.
Robert Storr
Sunday, February 17, 2013 / 2pm
Location: Voorhees Hall. $10 general admission; $5 museum members. Free to Rutgers faculty, staff, and students. RSVP to education@zimmerli.rutgers.edu. 

The Zimmerli is proud to present a lecture by leading American critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr. Storr is Professor of Painting and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. He was curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002, and was chosen commissioner of the Venice Biennial—the first American to assume that position. He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). His lecture at the Zimmerli is in conjunction with the exhibition Leonid Sokov: Ironic Objects and is devoted to the topic of Soviet nonconformist and Russian contemporary art. 

Concerts

Tickets: $15 nonmembers, $10 museum members, and $5 for Rutgers faculty, staff, and students (with valid ID). Tickets are sold on the day of the concert on a first-come, first-serve basis beginning at 12:30pm.The ticket price for nonmembers does not include museum admission. 

Crosscurrents: Beethoven and Shostakovich
Rosanne Vita Nahass and Yen Yu
Sunday, April 14, 2013 / 3pm

Pianist Rosanne Vita Nahass and violinist Yen Yu, team up for a virtuoso concert of German and Soviet music. The duo begins with Beethoven’s “Violin Sonata No. 9,” also known as the “Kreutzer” (which inspired Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella “The Kreutzer Sonata”). The piece premiered in 1803 and is known for its demanding violin part and emotional scope. This “conversation” between the two instruments opens with a first movement that is predominantly furious; the second, meditative; and the third, joyous and exuberant. Nahass and Yu also perform the “Sonata for Violin and Piano” Op. 134 by Dmitri Shostakovich. He composed and presented it to violinist David Oistrakh in 1968 as a birthday gift, much to Oistrakh’s delight. The work is representative of Shostakovich's final period, covering roughly the last decade of his life, with a refinement, and a darkening, of his musical language. As Shostakovich's only violin sonata, it is a “big” work—in duration and intensity—and demonstrates his experimentation with traditional techniques.

Rosanne Vita Nahass helps non-musicians cultivate a better understanding and appreciation for classical music with her innovative style. The Paterson, New Jersey, native earned the Fellowship Diploma from Trinity College London and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers University. She continued at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and practiced internal medicine for 18 years. On the surface, music and medicine seem disparate, but the musician fervently believes music is a healing art, essential to our humanity. 

A faculty member at the Preparatory Center for the Arts, a division within the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, Yen Yu grew up in China and began studying the violin with her father at an early age. She entered WuHan Conservatory of Music at age 14, under the tutelage of Professor Zhou Xin Min. Yu then studied at the University of Cincinnati and Juilliard School of Music.

Photos McKay Imaging Photography