Swiss Alps Classic
With our continuation of the collaboration with the Swiss Alps Classic Festival, we are happy to present our Young Scholar Alumni Avery Gagliano and Amir Siraj to the festival.
Avery and Amir performed for the opening concert of the festival at the Park Hotel Vitznau on June 2, 2021.
The introductory words of the concert were given by the conductor and exceptional violinist Emmanuel Tjeknavorian. The motto of this year’s Swiss Alps Classics is “Variations on the Theme of Music.”
The two scholars were impressed by the area’s natural surroundings. “The scenery is breathtaking. It’s very inspiring to performing in such a setting and in such a beautiful country. It was amazing,” Avery Gagliano said. She is the first prize winner of the 10th National Chopin Piano Competition 2020, hails from Washington, and studies in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute of Music. Amir Siraj from Brookline, Massachusetts, is studying piano at the New England Conservatory of Music. He also studies astrophysics at Harvard University and was the youngest scientist in this year’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” list. The multi-talented artist elaborated on his performance in Vitznau:
“I dedicated my program to Beethoven. During the 2020 Beethoven anniversary year, all of the concerts were canceled, so I wanted to celebrate him now. I started to explore how he was a source of inspiration for other composers. The Liszt piece ‘Fantasia on Motifs from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens’ is a tribute to Beethoven.”
Avery Gagliano & Amir Siraj
To round out the opening concert, Gagliano and Siraj played two works for piano with four hands. After Franz Schubert’s “Introduction, 4 Variations on an Original Theme and Finale in B- Flat Major,” his Marches militaires, Op. 51, No. 3 in E-Flat Major, was played as an encore, which prompted enthusiastic cries of “bravo” and hearty applause in the Verlinde Hall.
“The two young artists wowed the audience with their virtuosity and exhilarating playing together. Watching how they collaborated on the four-hand works was remarkable,”
– observed Clemens Hellsberg, Artistic Director of the Swiss Alps Classics.
