DSE Presents “Three Shepherds”

Sunday, June 26 at 3:00pm at Trinity Center for Urban Life, 22nd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia

Mimi Stillman, flute – Katherine Needleman, oboe – Yao Guang Zhai, clarinet – Natalie Zhu, piano

Music by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Monti, Suesse, Gipps, Shchedrin, Odgers

Attend in-person or virtually: tickets are flex passes so you can decide whether to attend in-person or virtually (you will receive a video of the concert three weeks afterwards, which will be available on-demand for four weeks)

Masks are required at Trinity Center for Urban Life

Please read on for more information about the program

Tickets here:

You’ll hear classics in a new way, and excellent works that are lesser-known:

– Selections by Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven arranged by H. Voxman for three woodwinds

– Rodion Shchedrin’s Three Shepherds, which Mimi Stillman and Katherine Needleman coached with the composer for performances in Switzerland while they were students at the Curtis Institute of Music. The composer’s wife, the late Maya Plisetskaya, prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi, coached them on the piece’s theatrical elements.

– Saint-Saëns’s Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs, written in 1887 for a tour of Russia with the composer at the piano and the leading French woodwind players of his day. A hit from then on, it is a standard work in the repertoire for woodwinds and piano.

– The Philadelphia premiere of Mexican-Canadian composer Alejandra Odgers’s Vesnyanka, commissioned by Katherine Needleman and inspired by Ukrainian folksongs welcoming the spring each year, which the composer offers “hoping that spring will come soon for all Ukrainians”

– Works by Dana Suesse, a jazz pianist and composer known as “the girl Gershwin,” Vittorio Monti’s beloved Czardas, and Ruth Gipps, a 20th-century British composer whose works are just now coming to prominence

Mimi Stillman, flute – founding Artistic Director, Dolce Suono Ensemble

Katherine Needleman, oboe – Principal Oboe, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Yao Guang Zhai, clarinet – Principal Clarinet, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Natalie Zhu, piano – Artist Director, Kingston Chamber Music Festival