Pianist Nadia Shpachenko performs in "Music and Modigliani" (03/06/05)

Pianist Nadia Shpachenko performs in "Music and Modigliani"

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - When one of Washington's leading art museums, The Phillips Collection, opened the much heralded exhibit "Modigliani: Beyond The Myth" on February 26, it scheduled a "lecture-recital" for the following day, titled "Music and Modigliani" and featuring pianist Nadia Shpachenko.

Phillips is known for its modern art exhibits, as well as its concert series, but this coupling of the two art forms was a first for the museum, as its music program director told the audience in introducing the Ukrainian-born pianist.

Ms. Shpachenko prepared a program of piano pieces by composers who were part of the circle of musicians, writers and artists in the Montparnasse area of Paris, where the Italian-born artist Amedeo Modigliani, the quintessential bohemian artist in early 20th century Paris, was known as "The Prince of Montparnasse."

As Ms. Shpachenko explained in the "lecture" introductions to the music selections, they were modern, light pieces, the kind that this group of artists would hear at concerts or while they dined and drank late into the night in the local clubs and restaurants in Montparnasse. On the program were "Cold Pieces," "Truly Flacid Preludes (for a dog)," and "Three Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy" by Erik Satie, who, along with Jean Cocteau, was a dominant force in the avant-garde music scene in Paris, Darius Milhaud's suite of dances "Nostalgia for Brazil" and a tango from his "The Ox on the Roof," as well as pieces by Francis Poulenc and other composers of that period.

Ms. Shpachenko began studying piano, cello and composition at 5 years of age. By 13, she had performed with the Kharkiv Philharmonic Orchestra and placed second in the All-Ukrainian Young Composers Competition. She emigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and now lives in California, where she completed her master's and doctor of musical arts degrees at the University of Southern California and where she is currently an associate professor of piano at the Shepherd University School of Music and a visiting faculty member at Pomona College.

A winner of numerous piano competitions, Ms. Shpachenko has performed in solo recitals and with orchestras in the United States and Europe - most recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Château de Modave in Belgium, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Careful readers of The Ukrainian Weekly's "Preview of Events" column and New Yorkers will recall that last October she helped open the "Music at the Institute's" 16th season in the American premiere of Yuriy Ishchenko's Piano Quartet No. 2. That same month she also had her Washington debut - at the Phillips Collection.

As a music venue in the nation's capital, the concert room on the second floor of the original Phillips Collection building is small, seating a little over 100, but it is far from insignificant. On January 2 it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first U.S. appearance by a young Canadian pianist - Glenn Gould.

On the way to the concert room from the main entrance in the new wing of the museum, one walks by a work of art from its permanent collection that complements the Modigliani exhibit-Shpachenko concert arrangement in a special kind of way: a polychromed plastic on wood, titled "Standing Woman," dated 1920 - the year Modigliani died at age 36 - by Alexander Archipenko, a Ukrainian émigré artist who at that time was developing his own reputation in the art world of Paris and other European capitals.

The Phillips Collection was established in 1918 by Duncan Phillips, the grandson of James Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Called The Phillips Memorial Gallery then, it was located in his 1897 Georgian Revival home just off Massachusetts Avenue ("Embassy Row"), now just two blocks from the Taras Shevchenko monument. As his art collection continued to grow, the Phillips family moved out in 1930 and officially turned the house into a museum.

| Home Page |