Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Sphinx Competition Winner: Elena Urioste, violin
JONATHAN COOMBS, PIANO

Sunday, November 15, 2009, at 3pm | Foellinger Great Hall

Sunday Salon Series | On its October 2008 visit to Krannert Center, the Sphinx Chamber Orchestra brought powerful vision, riveting absorption, intriguing selections, and a legion of outstanding musicians—among them, violin soloist, two-time Sphinx Competition winner, and London Music Masters international career development award winner Elena Urioste, who charmed the Great Hall audience with her passion and startling technique on Ástor Piazzolla’s Invierno Porteño (Winter in Buenos Aires). Now Urioste, who is of Mexican and Basque descent, launches the Sunday Salon Series for the 2009-10 season. Selected by Symphony magazine as “an emerging artist to watch,” Urioste made her debut at age 13 with her win at the Albert M. Greenfield Competition and several years later took the stage at Carnegie Hall as the youngest musician ever featured in the Young Performers Career Advancement Showcase.

Her commanding stage presence, lyricism, and utter mastery of her instrument—a Michelangelo Bergonzi, Cremona, circa 1750—have since earned her invitations from the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony Orchestra, and Hungary’s Orchestra Dohnányi Budafok, as well as the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, the Sarasota and Aspen Music Festivals, and the Festival International de Musique in Sion, Switzerland. In 2009, along with beginning her graduate studies at the Juilliard School of Music under Joel Smirnoff, she will make her debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with award-winning conductor Alondra de la Parra and the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas.

This afternoon, Urioste will perform Schubert’s Rondo Brilliant in B Minor, Op. 70, D. 895; Strauss’ Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 18;
Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 1 in F Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 80; and Hubay’s Fantasie Brillante on Bizet’s “Carmen.”


Download the program for this performance
Patron Co-sponsors:
Lois and Ernest Gullerud