Lakecia Benjamin and Phoenix

Lakecia Benjamin and Phoenix

Friday | December 1 | 8pm

Berklee Performance Center

Lakecia Benjamin, voted Rising Star Alto Saxophonist in the 2020 DownBeat Critics Poll and selected among 2020’s “25 for the Future” by the same publication, fuses traditional conceptions of jazz, hip hop, and soul to create electrifyingly danceable grooves.

Benjamin’s Phoenix album and tour tell a personal story of recovery and emergence. She says, “when we came out from the pandemic we weren’t allowed to be broken…we had to be these beautiful absorbent birds and get to work. I wanted to highlight each month of that.”

Diana Adamyan violin

Renana Gutman piano

Thursday | December 7 | 7:30pm

Longy’s Pickman Hall

Debut Series

Armenian violinist Diana Adamyan is quickly gaining an international reputation as one of her generation’s most outstanding violinists. After winning First Prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition, the world’s most prestigious prize for young violinists, she went on to receive First Prize in the 2020 Khachaturian International Competition. Adamyan takes the Pickman Hall stage alongside Boston-based pianist Renana Gutman, a faculty member at Longy School of Music.

“Diana Adamyan is a name you will hear again…following her career promises to be a joy,” wrote Seen and Heard International. Be there when this phenomenal young artist makes her Boston recital debut.

Program:

W.A. Mozart Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 378

Jean Sibelius Pieces for violin and piano, Op. 81

Jean Sibelius Humoresque No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 89

Edvard Baghdasaryan “Rhapsody” for violin and piano

Camille Saint-Saëns Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 75

“One of the most thoughtful and reliably interesting artists of our time.”

–Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A remarkable figure, as much a thinker as a player...and as much admired for his pioneering, sometimes challenging programming as he is for his brilliantly perceptive playing.”

–The Scotsman

Jeremy Denk piano

Saturday | December 9 | 8pm | NEC’s Jordan Hall

Sunday | December 10 | 3pm | Meadow Hall at Groton Hill Music Center

Pianist and author Jeremy Denk curates a program that unites female composers across the centuries. Works by Louise Farrenc and Clara Schumann, French Romantic holdout Cécile Chaminade, American pianist and composer Amy Beach, and modernist-turnedfolk-revivalist Ruth Crawford Seeger sit alongside works by acclaimed contemporary composers Tania León, Meredith Monk, Phyllis Chen, and Missy Mazzoli.

Denk pulls these diverse works and composers together to tell a story of women’s genius—both recognized and neglected in their own times and remembered and forgotten in ours—and lends his insight, technical panache, and expressive style to this era-spanning program.

Music From The Sole I Didn’t Come to Stay

Friday | January 12 | 8pm

Saturday | January 13 | 2pm & 8pm

NEC's Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre

Music From The Sole is a tap dance and live music company that celebrates tap’s connections to Afro-Brazilian music and dance, and other influences across the African Diaspora. Jointly founded by Brazilian tap dancer and choreographer Leonardo Sandoval and American composer and bassist Gregory Richardson, the company aims to bring tap dance—America's original vernacular dance—and its lineage to the widest possible audience.

I Didn’t Come to Stay, a work for eight dancers and five-piece band, earned a spot on the New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2022 list. It explores tap’s connections to house, samba, Brazilian funk, and jazz. The artists embrace these forms' shared roots in the African diaspora to reflect on racial and cultural identity, while also celebrating the joy, strength, depth, and virtuosity of Black dance and music.