Engelbach-Hart Music Festival (Illinois)
Nadia Boulanger opens, with music that began somewhere else: the Modéré heard first was written in 1911 for organ and came to the cello afterwards. She went on to teach Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, Quincy Jones and more than 250 others, and gave up composing herself in the early 1920s. "If there is one thing of which I am certain," she wrote, "it is that I wrote useless music." She was wrong, and this is a rare chance to hear why.
Bloch's Three Nocturnes bring all three players together for the first time in the evening. Then two short pieces for cello and piano by Andrea Casarrubios, a Spanish cellist and composer: Silbo, from 2021, named for the whistled language of the Canary Islands, and 24 Mozas, from 2017, two dozen character sketches compressed into under four minutes. Her solo cello piece SEVEN, written for the seven o'clock applause for healthcare workers during the lockdown, was nominated for a Grammy in 2025.
Lili Boulanger's Nocturne also dates from 1911, the same year as her sister's organ pieces; she was eighteen. Two years later she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome. In 1918 she died of intestinal tuberculosis at twenty-four, and Nadia, who outlived her by sixty-one years, kept a shrine to her at home. Kurtág follows: three pieces from 1979, Op. 14e, the first of them marked Öd und traurig, bleak and sad.
Two teenage trios close the night. Rachmaninoff wrote his single-movement Trio élégiaque in G minor in Moscow over four days in January 1892, aged eighteen; it waited until 1947 for a first edition. Shostakovich was sixteen, and three years into the conservatory, when he wrote the C minor Trio, Op. 8, for Tatyana Glivenko. By the time it was prepared for publication six decades later the last twenty-two bars of the piano part had been lost, and his pupil Boris Tishchenko wrote them back.
CreArtBox opens the Engelbach-Hart Music Festival, three nights on Illinois College's Fine Arts Series running 6 to 8 November 2026, all free to attend.
Program
- Nadia BoulangerThree Pieces for cello and piano - No. 1, Modéré 3'
- Ernest BlochThree Nocturnes for Piano Trio 11'
- Andrea CasarrubiosSilbo · and · 24 Mozas · for cello and piano 10'
- Lili BoulangerNocturne for violin and piano 4'
- György KurtágTre Pezzi 13'
- Sergei RachmaninoffTrio élégiaque in G minor, No. 1 15'
- Dmitri ShostakovichPiano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8 14'
Performers
- Josefina Urracapiano
- Emilie-Anne Gendronviolin
- Ana Kimcello
Guest artist
Indiana-native cellist Ana Kim performs on modern and period instruments, and since 2024 has been Assistant Principal cello of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra. She also plays with Philharmonia Baroque, Teatro Nuovo and the New York Trinity Baroque orchestras, and has appeared at Yellow Barn, Music@Menlo, Oregon Bach, the Verbier Academy and Prussia Cove. She holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California and studied Historical Performance at Juilliard; her teachers include János Starker, Ralph Kirshbaum and Laurence Lesser.
About CreArtBox
CreArtBox is a New York–based chamber music and multimedia ensemble founded in 2013, performing at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music and on tour internationally. The ensemble's New York Series presents approximately six productions a year - combining commissioned premieres, reimagined classics, and collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, and writers.
In parallel, CreArtBox runs Festival ADAR each August in rural Asturias, Spain - an international arts festival pairing chamber music with site-specific performance in churches, hórreos, and mountain villages. Both the New York Series and Festival ADAR are produced by CreArtBox, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit.