January 25 – Timeless Bonds & Renewed Horizons with Kavafian, Wiley, O’Connor, and Wosner

Concert sponsored by Jeffrey N. Mehler, CFP^® LLC and Essex Meadows
Piano sponsored by Masonicare at Chester Village

Where and When:

VALLEY REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
256 Kelsey Hill Road, Deep River, CT
Click here to view in Google maps.

Sunday, January 25, 2026.

Concert begins at 3:00 pm; outer doors open at 2:00 pm; auditorium doors open at 2:30 pm.

Accessible parking, entry and seating are available.

Concert Program:

Ani Kavafian, violin
Peter Wiley, cello
Tara Helen O’Connor, flute
Shai Wosner, piano

Trio Sonata in C Major, BMV 1037 – Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Maombi Asante for Flute, Violin and Cello – Valerie Coleman (1970-)

Trio for Flute, Cello and Piano – Louise Farrenc (1804-1875)

PianoTrio in B-flat Major, D. 898 – Franz Schubert (1797-1898)

Artist Biographies:

Ani Kavafian, violin

Violinist Ani Kavafian enjoys a prolific career as a soloist, chamber musician, and professor. She has performed with virtually all of America’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony. In the 2019-20 season, she continued her longtime association as an artist of the Chamber Music Society with appearances in New York and on tour. Last summer she participated in several music festivals, including the Heifetz International Institute and the Sarasota Chamber Music, Bridgehampton, Meadowmount, Norfolk, and Angel Fire festivals. She and her sister, violinist and violist Ida Kavafian, have performed with the symphonies of Detroit, Colorado, Tucson, San Antonio, and Cincinnati, and have recorded the music of Mozart and Sarasate on the Nonesuch label.

Ani is a Full Professor at Yale University and has appeared at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall numerous times with colleagues and students from Yale. She has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions award and has appeared at the White House on three occasions. Her recordings can be heard on the Nonesuch, RCA, Columbia, Arabesque, and Delos labels.

Born in Istanbul of Armenian heritage, Kavafian studied violin in the US with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff. She received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School under Ivan Galamian. She plays the 1736 Muir McKenzie Stradivarius violin.

Peter Wiley, cello

Tara Helen O’Connor, flute

Tara Helen O’Connor is a charismatic performer noted for her artistic depth, brilliant technique and colorful tone spanning every musical era. Recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a two-time Grammy nominee, she was the first wind player chosen to participate in The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) and is now a Season Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A Wm. S. Haynes flute artist, Tara is a regular participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, Spoleto Festival USA, Chamber Music Northwest, Mainly Mozart Festival, Music from Angel Fire, Rockport Music, Bay Chamber Concerts, Manchester Music Festival, the Banff Centre, the Great Mountains Music Festival, Chesapeake Music Festival and the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. Along with her husband Daniel Phillips, she is the newly appointed Co-Artstic Director of the Music From Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico.

A much sought-after chamber musician and soloist, she has premiered hundreds of new works and has collaborated with the Orion String Quartet, St. Lawrence Quartet, Emerson String Quartet, Jaime Laredo, Dawn Upshaw, Eliot Fisk, Jeremy Denk, Ida Kavafian, Peter Serkin and David Shifrin. Tara is a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, the legendary Bach Aria Group and is a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning New Millennium Ensemble. A passionate advocate of new music, she is a member of the Talea and Cygnus Ensembles. Tara has appeared on A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts and PBS’ Live from Lincoln Center. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Bridge Records. She has just released a solo CD of American flute works entitled The Way Things Go on Bridge Records with pianist Margaret Kampmeier.

Tara holds a DMA from Stony Brook University where she studied with the late Samuel Baron. Her other teachers include Julius Levine, Thomas Nyfenger, Robert Dick and Keith Underwood. Her yearly summer flute master class at the Banff Centre in Canada was legendary.  She is Associate Professor of Flute, Head of the Woodwinds Department and the Coordinator of Classical Music Studies at Purchase College School of the Arts Conservatory of Music. Additionally, Tara is on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music, the Contemporary Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music and is a visiting artist, teacher and coach at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.  She lives with her husband, violinist Daniel Phillips and their two miniature dachshunds, Chloé and Ava on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Shai Wosner, piano

Pianist Shai Wosner has attracted international recognition for his exceptional artistry, musical integrity, and creative insight. His performances of a broad range of repertoire — from Beethoven and Schubert to Ligeti and the music of today — reflect a degree of virtuosity and intellectual curiosity that has made him a favorite among audiences and critics, who note his “keen musical mind and deep musical soul” (NPR’s All Things Considered).

Recently, Wosner has given the world premiere of Vijay Iyer’s Piano Concerto Handmade Universe which was written for him and ECCO (East Coast Chamber Orchestra) with whom he has enjoyed a longstanding relationship. The concerto highlights his commitment to performing works by contemporary composers and his ongoing relationship with Iyer, whose piece, Plinth, was part of Shai’s multi-composer project – Variations on a Theme of FDR. Following the premiere of Iyer’s piano concerto in New York, Wosner gives the Philadelphia premiere with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Additional upcoming and recent include highlights include a U.S. tour with Martin Fröst and Antoine Tamestit in a program that includes the many of Shai’s arrangements made especially for the group, Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with the Symphoniker Hamburg, multiple performances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, various solo recitals and tours with Joshua Bell and as part of the Zukerman Trio with violinist Pinchas Zukerman and cellist Amanda Forsyth.

In recent years, Wosner’s arrangements of various Beethoven Symphonies for piano trio have been premiered and toured in the U.S. and Europe by Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma and are available in GRAMMY-nominated recordings released by Sony Classical.

Wosner’s latest album, of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, was released on Onyx Classics. This recording serves as the companion to Wosner’s 2022 recording for New Focus of the aforementioned Variations on a Theme of FDR. The Diabelli Variations had inspired Wosner to commission five contemporary composers — Derek Bermel, Anthony Cheung, John Harbison, Vijay Iyer, and Wang Lu — to create a work based on a quote from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1938 address to the Daughters of the American Revolution: “Remember, remember always, that all of us … are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” In the 2022-23 Season, Wosner paired Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations with Variations on a Theme of FDR in various recitals. The project was commissioned by People’s Symphony Concerts where he was Artist-in-Residence in 2020-2025 and The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Other recent recordings from Wosner also include The Air Suspended, on which Wosner performs Christopher Cerrone’s concerto for piano and strings with the Argus Quartet and bassist Pat Swoboda, released on New Focus. In 2020 Wosner released a selection of Schubert piano sonatas continuing his career-long, critically acclaimed engagement with the composer’s music. This double album, released by Onyx Classics, completes Wosner’s recorded series of the composer’s last six sonatas, which he has also performed as a recital series. Additional recordings include Impromptu, comprising improvisationally inspired works by composers from Beethoven and Schubert to Gershwin and Ives; concertos and capriccios by Haydn and Ligeti with the Danish National Symphony conducted by Nicholas Collon; an all-Schubert solo album featuring a selection of the composer’s folk-inspired piano works; solo works by Brahms and Schoenberg; and works by Schubert paired with new works by Missy Mazzoli. As a chamber musician, Wosner has recorded Beethoven’s complete sonatas and variations for cello and piano with Ralph Kirshbaum and — for Cedille Records — works by Bartók, Janácek, and Kurtág with violinist Jennifer Koh.

Wosner is a recipient of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award — a prize he used to commission Michael Hersch’s concerto Along the Ravines, which he performed with the Seattle Symphony and Deutsche Radio Philharmonie in its world and European premieres. He was in residence with the BBC as a New Generation Artist, during which he appeared frequently with the BBC orchestras, including conducting Mozart concertos from the keyboard with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He returned to the BBC Scottish Symphony in both subscription concerts and Proms performances with Donald Runnicles and appeared with the BBC Philharmonic in a live broadcast from Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. As a concerto soloist in North America, Wosner has appeared with the major orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Ottawa, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Toronto, among others. In addition to the BBC orchestras, he has performed abroad with the Aurora Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, LSO St. Luke’s, Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam, Orchestre National de Belgique, Staatskapelle Berlin, and the Vienna Philharmonic, among others. Wosner has also appeared with the Orpheus, St. Paul, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestras, having conducted the latter from the keyboard in a 2010 concert that was broadcast on American Public Radio. Recently, he toured with ECCO to Memphis, Philadelphia, and New York for the world-premiere performances of Christopher Cerrone’s piano concerto The Air Suspended.

Wosner has worked with such conductors as Daniel Barenboim, Jirí Belohlávek, James Conlon, Alan Gilbert, Gunther Herbig, James Judd, Zubin Mehta, Peter Oundjian, Donald Runnicles, Leonard Slatkin, Jeffrey Tate, and Yan Pascal Tortelier, and has performed at summer festivals including the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Chautauqua Music Festival, Bravo! Vail festival, Grand Teton Music Festival, Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, and Ravinia Festival. For several consecutive summers, he was involved in the West-Eastern Divan Workshop led by Barenboim and toured as soloist with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Widely sought after by colleagues for his versatility and spirit of partnership, Wosner has collaborated as a chamber musician with numerous artists, including Martha Argerich, Martin Fröst, Lynn Harrell, Dietrich Henschel, Ralph Kirshbaum, Jennifer Koh, Cho-Liang Lin, Christian Tetzlaff, Orion Weiss, and Pinchas Zukerman. He has also collaborated with leading chamber ensembles, including the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet in The Schubert Effect recital series. Wosner is a past member of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) and performs regularly at various chamber music festivals, including Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, Piano Aux Jacobins festival in France, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Born in Israel, Wosner enjoyed a broad musical education from a very early age, studying piano with Opher Brayer and Emanuel Krasovsky, as well as composition, theory, and improvisation with André Hajdu. He later studied with Emanuel Ax at The Juilliard School, where Wosner is also now on the piano faculty. He resides in New York with his wife and two children.

For more information on Mr. Wosner, please visit his Facebook fan page, follow him on Instagram (@shaiwosner), and go to shaiwosner.com.