Ensemble for the Romantic Century

Eve Wolf, Founder and Executive Artistic Director
Max Barros, Co-Artistic Director
James Melo, Musicologist in Residence
Donald T. Sanders, Director of Theatrical Production
Vanessa James, Production and Costume Designer
Beverly Emmons, Lighting Designer

Board of Directors

Paul Leach , Acting President
Eve Wolf, Vice-President
James Melo, Secretary
Susan Winokur, Business Manager
Max Barros
Paul Leach
Donald T. Sanders

Advisory Board

David Burrows, musicologist
Vanessa James, designer and art director
Rena Charnin Mueller, musicologist
Stewart Pollens, conservator of instruments
Nancy B. Reich, musicologist

Ensemble for the Romantic Century, now in its ninth season, was founded by pianist Eve Wolf in 2001, with the intention of creating an engaging and innovative approach to chamber music concerts. Co-directed by Eve Wolf and her fellow-pianist Max Barros, ERC’s stellar team includes James Melo, musicologist; Donald T. Sanders, director of theatrical production; Vanessa James, production designer; and Beverly Emmons, lighting designer, as well as some of the finest actors and musicians active in New York and elsewhere. ERC's theatrical concerts interweave letters, memoirs, diaries, poems, and other literature with chamber and vocal music; the music’s historical context is reinforced through its connections with history, politics, philosophy, psychology, and the other arts to create a compelling new performance experience.

During its first eight seasons ERC has produced over 30 different theatrical concerts, and it continues to add new productions each season. ERC has partnered with such institutions as The Jewish Museum of New York; the Archivio Fano of Venice, Italy; the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal; the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA; the French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, New York; the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University; the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; and the City University of New York (CUNY). Since 2007 ERC has been a musicological affiliate in residence at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, where ERC has established an annual series of interdisciplinary seminars for each of the Ensemble's concerts.

ERC's programs are distinguished by their artistic excellence, breadth of repertoire, and variety of subject matter. During its 2009-10 season, Artists in Exile, ERC extended its interdisciplinary scope with the presentation at Columbia University’s Italian Academy of a Toscanini mini-festival that included a performance of Toscanini: In my Heart too Much of the Absolute, a CUNY seminar with distinguished author and Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs, and a preview showing of the documentary film Toscanini in His Own Words. This production was then performed to a sold-out audience in the Sale Apollinee at Venice’s historic Teatro La Fenice, with an Italian script and Italian actors. ERC's production Chopin: Letters from Majorca was presented using an original 19th-century Pleyel piano, the type of instrument favored by Chopin, for the performance of the composer's complete 24 Preludes, op. 28. In Heine: First they Burn Books, ERC explored the connections between politics and music.

In its 2007-08 season, Imaginings, ERC embarked on a revealing journey through the imaginations of four writers, with The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Tolstoy's Last Days (Tolstoy), Herself to Her a Music (Emily Dickinson), and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (Verne), a large multimedia production that incorporated video design for the first time in an ERC program.

In its sixth season, The Paris Project, ERC created a series of four theatrical concerts that evoked the artistic, literary, and political changes that electrified Paris at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In The Dreyfus Affair, ERC created a large political and musical canvas with seven actors and seven musicians, contrasting with the bohemian and ebullient world evoked in Satie: Bohemian from Montmartre. The season ended with a gala performance, at Florence Gould Hall, of Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, a complex multimedia concert with music from the 1920's to the 1980's.

In 2005, ERC completed a commission by the Jewish Museum in New York for a production based on the famous Sonntagsmusik salons of Fanny Mendelssohn. The concert, Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of Her Brother's Shadow, was related to the Jewish Museum's exhibition The Power of Conversation, showcasing female salonnières from the 18th to the 20th centuries. ERC also served as music consultant for the exhibition. Van Gogh's Ear, an ERC collaboration with The French Institute-Alliance Française/FIAF, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts/MIFA, and the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal, was performed at Florence Gould Hall and then – in both French and English - in Montreal, where it received international acclaim. Strad Magazine hailed the production as “the most intriguing and successful program of the entire festival.”

In 2004, the Ensemble presented The Young Arthur Rubinstein at the Arthur Rubinstein Hall in São Paulo during the Eleazar de Carvalho Week, to overwhelming success. In the spring of 2004, Schubert's Dream was performed while ERC was in residence at Williams College in Massachusetts.

ERC's artistic excellence was recognized in 2007-08 through a professional performance grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and more recently through a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA).

ERC is proud to announce that it has been awarded grants from both NYSCA and DCA for the upcoming 2009-10 season. These grants are a testimony to the growing recognition of the Ensemble as one of the most innovative chamber music groups in New York.

In its relatively short history, the Ensemble for the Romantic Century has enriched the New York musical scene with highly innovative productions that are also historically informed, aesthetically exquisite, and emotionally transporting.

Eve Wolf, (pianist and author; Founder and Executive Artistic Director of ERC) (www.evewolfpianist.com) received her BA in Art History from Columbia University and an MA in Piano Performance from New York University. She has appeared in solo and chamber music recitals in the U.S. and Europe and has won numerous awards, including prizes in the V. Bellini International Competition in Italy and the Houston Symphony Orchestra's Concerto Competition. For the past eight seasons in New York, as Executive Artistic Director of the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Ms. Wolf has written scripts and performed in productions such as Paderewski in Paris (2001), The Young Arthur Rubinstein (2003), None but the Lonely Heart: The Story of Tchaikovsky & Nadezhda von Meck (2004), Dora: A Case of Hysteria (2005), Tolstoy's Last Days (2005), and Van Gogh's Ear (2006), which was also performed in a bilingual (French and English) version at the Festival Musique de Chambre de Montréal. Ms. Wolf was the scriptwriter for Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of her brother's shadow, which was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of New York and performed in 2006, as well as for the audio guide of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel Salon in the Exhibition The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons at the Jewish Museum in New York City – an exhibition that received international acclaim. In 2006 Ms. Wolf was commissioned to write Cara, Cara Compagna for the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; she wrote the script in Italian and English, and it was performed in both languages. In the 2006-07 season Ms. Wolf wrote and performed in The Dreyfus Affair and Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare by her Bachelors; the latter was ERC's largest multimedia work to date. In 2008, she wrote and performed in Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon – the final concert in a series called Imaginings; this multimedia production, presented at the Florence Gould Hall, was the first ERC concert to include video design. In June 2009, she performed in Toscanini: Nel mio cuore troppo di assoluto at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice; this production played to a sold-out audience in an Italian version of the script that she had originally written for ERC's 2008-09 season, dedicated to Artists in Exile.

Ms. Wolf has taught piano and coached chamber music in New York City for the past 25 years. She is currently an instructor of piano at Teachers College-Columbia University and a staff accompanist at Mannes College The New School of Music.

This season marks the initiation of a new seminar given by Ms. Wolf, Confronting Memory: A seminar in memorization techniques for pianists, which will be held at Klavierhaus in New York City. She has studied and taught memorization techniques for over 25 years and is currently writing a book on the subject.

Max Barros, (pianist, co-artistic director of ERC), has won wide acclaim as one of South America's foremost pianists. Born in California and raised in Brazil, Mr. Barros was presented with the "Soloist of the Year" Award by the Sao Paulo Music Critics Association. He is also a dedicated champion of Brazilian music, having premiered and recorded several works by the nation's foremost composers. He recorded Amaral Vieira's Piano Quintet with the Ensemble Capriccio and has recorded for Naxos the complete piano concertos by Camargo Guarnieri with conductor Thomas Conlin and the Warsaw Philharmonic. Mr. Barros has toured South America with the Virtuosi di Praga and has been a guest artist with the American String Quartet and the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble. He is well known for his stylistic and historically informed interpretations, and his extensive research into the performance practice of early keyboard instruments has allowed him to bring fresh insights to his performances on the modern piano. Mr. Barros studied early pianos with Malcolm Bilson, and with the Barros Classical Consort he recorded the complete trios of Boccherini and Stephen Storace. He appears often at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, performing on their collection of old keyboard instruments. In 2008 Mr. Barros made his debut at the Caramoor Festival performing Guarnieri's Concertino for piano and orchestra with the St. Luke's Orchestra under Michael Barrett.

James Melo (musicologist) has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, United States, and Austria, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 70 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music and Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording on Villa-Lobos' complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri's complete piano concertos on Naxos. In 2006, he began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer. In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center.

Donald T. Sanders, (writer, producer, director of theatrical productions for ERC) graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded a Thouron Fellowship. He received a C.I.D from the University of Bristol, England, and an M.F.A from the Yale School of Drama where he was assistant to Nikos Psacharapoulos and drama master of Stiles College. Known for his stage adaptations from novels, his Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Old New York by Edith Wharton were both presented by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater. Mr. Sanders has been executive artistic director of MIFA/Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts since 1993. He is also the author of 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness, Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream and Dubrovsky, the opera by jazz composer William Russo. In 2002, he was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France. He has been Director of Theatrical Productions for Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) in New York City since 2005.

Vanessa James (set and costume designer) is a designer of sets, costumes, and lighting for the theater and opera and an art director for film and television. She has received an Emmy Citation and two other Emmy nominations. She was the art director for a documentary on the history of the White House directed by Oscar winning director Paul Wagner. Other film credits include Andy Warhol’s Brand X, Ragtime, and The King of Comedy. Her Off-Broadway credits include the revival of Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, Arthur Penn’s production of Chambers and the musical Your Don’t Miss Water by Cornelius Eady. She is currently the chair of Theatre Arts at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of The Geneology of Greek Mythology and Shakespeare’s Geneologies.

Beverly Emmons, Lighting Design, has received six Broadway Tony Award nominations for “Jekyll and Hyde”, “The Heiress”, “Passion”, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, “A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine” and “The Elephant Man”. She has designed the lighting for many other notable Broadway shows including, “Annie Get Your Gun”, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”, “Good”, “The Dresser” and “Amadeus”. Her designs for dance include Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown and for theatre artists, Joe Chaikin, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk and Lucinda Childs. Her lighting for opera has been seen at La Scala and the Met among other venues. “Peggy” marks Beverly’s first design for Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC).