Sunday Music, Part Two
By Janet Kirkconnell
Sunday Music in the Garden Room, a series now in its thirteenth year, is kept afloat by donations and volunteers. The second half of the 2019-2020 season of Sunday Music, presented in the K.C. Irving Environmental Science Centre on the Acadia campus begins on January 5 with a piano recital by Baxter’s Harbour native Tabitha Payzant. A graduate of Mount Allison University and the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, she will present an excellent program of a Bach prelude and fugue, one of Beethoven’s late sonatas (op. 110), a Chopin étude, and Robert Schumann’s challenging Carnaval. “She is a wonderful pianist who plays with great sensitivity, musicality and honesty,” says her teacher at Memorial, Timothy Steeves, the piano half of Canada’s premiere violin-piano duo, Duo Concertante. He adds that “it has been a joy having her in the studio.”
Four more concerts follow: on February 2, a clarinet-violin-piano trio (Eileen Walsh, Gillian Smith, and Simon Docking); on March 1, the Ulysses String Quartet from New York (the graduate quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School of Music); on March 15, Merkelo & Salov perform on trumpet and piano (on a Debut Atlantic tour); and, on May 3, to end the season, a return engagement of the thrilling Doucet-Bouey duo, piano and violin, for the annual William Marshall Bishop Memorial concert.
Tabitha Payzant performs on January 5 at 2pm. Admission is free.