Virtual Concert Halls

02/28/2022

A HUGE round of applause to COLIN CHANG!

He is another one of our amazing Laureates of the 2021 Sound Espressivo Global Competition

On top of winning the honour of Laureate, Colin also won the Outstanding Artist Award from iClassical Academy

He won 1st Prize in his Age Category, sharing the prize with another amazing pianist Yihui (Gabriel) Wu.

Courtesy of Brilliant Talent Discovery Awards Colin also won the Excellent in Piano Performance Scholarship, guaranteeing him an opportunity to participate in masterclasses and performances as part of that organisation.

Bravo to Colin Chang!! 🙌🏼🙌🏼 And special mention to his teacher Michael Berkovsky of The Royal Conservatory

02/18/2022

A big congratulations to the incredible William Yeh on being awarded Laureate of the 2021 Sound Espressivo Global Competition

On top of Laureate, William was awarded:

- Rising Start Award from iClassical Academy
- the Ouspensky Family and Friends: Conducting Award, with an opportunity to study conducting with Giacomo Franco, and conduct a concert with the New York Chamber Players Orchestra in DiMenna Center in the fall of 2022.
- William Yeh also won the Excellence in Violin Performance Scholarship from Brilliant Talent Discovery Awards
- He was awarded 2nd Prize in his age group 11-14.

It’s incredible that you won SO many awards, William!! We love your energy and enthusiasm as well as your spectacular musicianship. All the best in your future!!

02/17/2022

February 22 is the date! Five days until Winner of Sound Espressivo Competition Carnegie Hall Award Yerko Difonis' performance! He is an amazing virtuoso pianist with incredible sensitivity of his interpretations. His story is also an inspiration to all of us who encounter our own challenges! Many thanks to his wonderful teacher Karina Bruk! Visit competition: https://www.soundespressivocompetition.com/sound-espressivo-finals-2021
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Yerko Difonis, 28, is not the first musical prodigy born blind and partially deaf.
However, he is the first student with those disabilities to pursue a master of music degree in piano performance at Mason Gross School of the Arts (MGSA).
“God took away two of the main senses you need for music but gave him this incredible talent,” said his piano professor, Karina Bruk. “He is a virtuoso.”
Before the Chilean immigrant could enroll in Rutgers-New Brunswick this past fall, the university’s Office of Access and Disability Resources was asked to find a timely and economical way to transcribe his complex musical scores into braille – during a pandemic.
“You look at all that sheet music and it’s well beyond what most people do. It was like a foreign language to us when we first started,” said Jason Khurdan, manager of central services for the office.
Rutgers’ disability resources office has fine-tuned a cost-effective and comparatively fast process for transcribing music scores to braille, making Rutgers one of the few universities in the country to offer this service to visually impaired music students.
Now, a year after Difonis registered for MGSA, Rutgers’ disability resources office has fine-tuned a cost-effective and comparatively fast process for transcribing music scores to braille, making Rutgers one of the few universities in the country to offer this service to visually impaired music students.
“We’ve spoken with a lot of other universities with blind students in their music programs and almost none are providing this level of braille music,” said Khurdan. “Often times these students are dependent. They are learning by ear and develop a knack for memorizing it. A lot of them just make do. For some of them that may work, but it’s not equal access.”
That is how Difonis learned to play.
“I was 2 years old in the crib, and everyone would notice I would nod my head when they put music on,” said Difonis, who began playing the keyboard from memory as a 6-year-old.
He was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that blocks the brain’s ability to send signals to the eye. The cause of Difonis’s irreversible hearing loss is unknown but his external digital hearing aids make playing possible.
Difonis’s family emigrated to the United States in 2000. While in Brooklyn, he was a member of the children’s program. Difonis learned Braille and enrolled in the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School for those with vision loss.
Full article here:
https://lnkd.in/eegAhJDx
#inspiration #music #talent #concert #awards #blind #disabilityawareness #pianist

02/16/2022

Many congratulations to Terri Ji on becoming a Laureate of the 2021 Sound Espressivo Global Competition !!!

Terri Ji astounded us with her performances throughout her Semi-Finals and Finals. And we are delighted that she also won 1st Prize in her Age Category.

In addition Terri wins the iClassical Academy iClassical Academy Outstanding Artist Award. Congratulations, Terri. And all the best in the future!!

02/14/2022

Awards

Sound Espressivo Competition announced Laureates and Winners of 124 Awards. Congratulations to all participants, for their dazzling LIVE music performances on a Virtual Stage!
Thank you to our incredible Judges, for providing invaluable feedback to contestants!
Thank you to our generous collaborators, for sponsoring Awards aimed at helping contestants develop further their artistry and their careers!
Thank you to contestants' dedicated Teachers and Mentors, for guiding their students' through development of their talents!
Thank you to our audiences of nearly 1 million people, for viewing the Competition events and announcements, for cheering contestants, for voting on James Adler Audience Favorite Award, for "liking" our broadcasts, and for writing encouraging comments!

Help us spread further our message of celebrating live music and musicians!
Please like our channels, leave us a comment so we know that you, too, support initiatives like Sound Espressivo. Thank you all!
~Anna and SEC/VCHS Team
https://www.soundespressivocompetition.com/so/afNxdCmmi?languageTag=en#/main

02/14/2022

We are delighted to showcase our LAUREATES of the 2021 Sound Espressivo Global Competition!

This is Ayla Takeda Moreno, who played brilliantly for the Finals. She has won the 1st prize at our competition as well as winning awards from:
Outstanding Artist Award from iClassical Academy

Congratulations and all the best in your upcoming performances and career ahead!

02/05/2022

Virtual Concert Halls is happy to present the Sound Espressivo Competition Gala. Congratulations to all Contestants on their success at the competition. Many thanks to the Judges, to organizers, sponsors, teachers, parents, and everyone who helped make Sound Espressivo a great celebration of music!
Today will announce Winners and recipients of Sound Espressivo 2021 Awards.
SOUND ESPRESSIVO - A NEW GENERATION OF CLASSICAL MUSIC COMPETITION, Empowering Tomorrow's Musicians!
SEC brings hope and encouragement for musicians. Contestants perform in live broadcasts from their own location anywhere in the world.
The current time asks for change and encouragement. We at Sound Espressivo find it critically important to provide musicians with the glimpse of HOPE. That is why we offer the possibility to perform live concerts online with beautifully delivered sound quality, because the "era of Zoom and pre-recorded videos" is quite depressing for people in the performing arts. We provide technical and production systems adopted from TV practices that are standard for the US television industry and networks.
37 Members of SEC Jury Panel and 16 companies which sponsor Prizes are a manifestation of a truly global community and cooperation.

SOUND ESPRESSIVO brings this extraordinary opportunity to perform live on a virtual platform, which delivers the real beauty of live music, to the complete community of music teachers and students with no boundaries. Live Internet broadcasting of beautiful performances can and should be available to all who dedicate their love and talent to classical music!
https://www.soundespressivocompetition.com/

See you all at the Gala!
SEC and VCHS Teams

02/03/2022

Composer's Voice features RUSQUARTET February 3, 2022 at 7:00 AM ESTEST

Composer's Voice features RUSQUARTET with Contemporary Quartets.
Contemporary Quartets is presenting the works of Annette Kruisbrink, Greg Pfeiffer, and Leonardo Le San.
Contemporary Quartets Project is creating a new way to produce contemporary String Quartets
Vox Novus in collaboration with Virtual Concert Halls will broadcast Contemporary Quartets featuring the RUSQUARTET. The project is designed to help and empower contemporary composers to produce, perform, and record their works for string quartet.

RUSQUARTET was founded in 2001 at the Academic College of Music of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory under the tutelage of Galina Soboleva, great cellist of the Prokofiev String Quartet. Members of the RUSQUARTET are DMA graduates from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory*where they have been students of the Professor Dmitry Shebalin (Borodin String Quartet).

The musicians are actively promoting contemporary composers and rarely performed compositions. The quartet's programs include Andrei Eshpai's *Concordia discordance, two string quartets by *Mikhail Marutaev, a string quintet for two violins, two violas, and a cello by Alexander Lokshin, as well as compositions by Georges Onslow,Lex van Delden (the Netherlands), Kelly-Marie Murphy (Canada), Steve Martland (Great Britain), and Jonathan Dove (Great Britain), Olli Mustonen (Finland).

Composer Leonardo Le San has had a distinguished career of premiers at Carnegie Hall, The Merkin Hall, The Palais Ehrbar of Vienna, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Harvard Musical Association; as well as, a notable appearance as both composer and pianist at the White House. Leonardo has been featured on RCN and international classical TV through the Euro-channel of Allegro-HD reaching the network’s two million viewers.

As a stylistically diverse composer of chamber, solo, and electronic music, Greg Pfeiffer's works range from unapologetically tonal to unforgivingly atonal. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally including performances at the June in Buffalo festival, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and by groups such as the Boston Microtonal Society, ThingNY, The Curiosity Cabinet and the Contemporary Chamber Players of Stony Brook University.

Dutch guitarist and composer Annette Kruisbrink (1958) has composed over 400 works, primarily for guitar and guitar with other instruments. Her compositions have been published in America, Canada, and various European publishers. She has received numerous prizes and awards at prestigious composition competitions. Kruisbrink holds guitar and composition seminars throughout the world and is often a jury member at international competitions.

http://www.voxnovus.com/composersvoice/featuring/contemporaryquartets/RUSQUARTET

https://virtualconcerthalls.com/

02/02/2022

Quartets by Beethoven? - "oh yes, monumental!" Quartets by Schostakovich? - "oh yes, powerful!" But that's our response 50, 100, 150 years after they were composed... did you know that both these iconic creators of quartet music struggled even with getting musicians to PERFORM their quartets, let alone shoring audience to HEAR them? Are you content with being part of the infamous "narrow-sighted contemporaries of musical giants" who were just utterly unable to recognize the newly written great works for what they were, or about to become? People just couldn't see Beethoven's, Schostakovich's, and many other's music for what it was going to be just a few decades later - future everyone's "classics". Those which today not only dominate concert programming, but pe*****te every moments of our lives, from movies, to commercials, even to phone ringtones! Maybe we can do better? Maybe we start by just listening, watching? So our opinion is at least better informed?
Contemporary Quartets features RUSQUARTET presenting the works of
 Annette Kruisbrink, Greg Pfeiffer, and Leonardo Le San.
February 3, 2022 at 7:00 AM EST (UTC-5)
Contemporary Quartets featuring Argus Quartet presenting the works of Augusta Bates, Jane Brockman, Jerry Casey, Dr Jenny Game, and Igor Korneitchouk.

February 4, 2022 at 2:00 PM EST (UTC-5)
https://www.youtube.com/c/VCHs20