Mayrong Tsong. Courtesy of Mayron Tsong
By Southwester Staff
The Southwest Chamber Players will offer their 193rd concert on Friday, August 25 at 7:00 p.m. in St.Augustine’s Episcopal Church at Maine Avenue and Sixth Street SW.
The program, called Haydn’ Nothin, will feature a solo rendition of Joseph Haydn’s Piano Sonata in D Major, Hob.XVI:24 performed by Mayron Tsong, a magnificently credentialed pianist with a forthcoming album featuring Haydn, Mozart, Berg, and Prokofiev.
Hadyn, an Austrian composer of the Classical period, is considered the father of the classical symphony and string quartet and an innovator in the composition of piano sonatas and trios.
The August program from the Southwest Chamber Players will also include additional samples of the legendary composer’s work rendered by Mark Furth, violin; Julia Goudimova, cello; Perry Klein, trumpet; Marje Palmieri, soprano; and Stephen Brown and David Ehrlich, piano.
There will be a second major focus of the program: the chamber music workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, of which Donald Oehler and Rachel Smith, clarinet, will add to the performance.
A Steinway artist, Mayron Tsong has performed in nearly every state in the continental United States, as well as Canada, Russia, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. After her solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Harris Goldsmith of The New York Concert Review praised it as “an enlivening, truly outstanding recital.” Fanfare Magazine called her “a genius, pure and simple… perhaps, a wizard.”
Holding graduate degrees in both piano performance and music theory from Rice University, Tsong is a distinguished pedagogue, having appeared around the world as a master class clinician, lecturer, judge and visiting professor. She was also artistic director of the first William Kapell Young Artist Piano Competition at the University of Maryland in 2012.
Currently an associate professor and co-coordinator of the piano division at the University of Maryland, she previously served as head of keyboard studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Commenting on her choice of Haydn’s music, Tsong noted, “while much has been said already about Haydn’s humor and wit, still more could be said about his mischievous temperament, especially enjoyed in his finales, and the understated passion of his slow movements which can move the heart like a Chopin nocturne.“