One of the most exciting young artists to emerge in recent years, Martina Filjak is garnering international praise for her poetic passion and technical mastery at the keyboard as well as for her charismatic personality and magnetic stage presence. Her transition from prodigy to mature artist has been all the more remarkable against the backdrop of political maelstrom that defined her native Croatia during her childhood.
Martina’s unwavering hunger for music, nurtured by piano teacher parents, has been her lodestar. Civil strife or no, she graduated from the Zagreb Music Academy and subsequently from the Vienna Conservatory and the soloist’s class at Hannover’s Hochschule für Musik. She participated in masterclasses at the Como Piano Academy, where she was coached by Dmitri Bashkirov, Peter Frankl and Andreas Staier.
In 2009, Martina Filjak won first prize in the Cleveland International Piano Competition, following which she made concerto debuts at the Konzerthaus Berlin and Vienna’s Musikverein and her recital debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall/Zankel Hall (“Brilliant, sensitive and imaginative playing with resourcefulness of technique and naturalness of musicality. …A striking individuality …A pianist to watch” The New York Times). Prior to winning the Cleveland competition, she had been first prizewinner of the 2007 Viotti International Piano Competition in Italy and the 2008 Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona.
Martina Filjak has performed with leading orchestras worldwide under the batons of Heinrich Schiff, Theodor Guschlbauer, Sebastian Lang – Lessing , Christian Zacharias and Stefan Sanderling. As recitalist and concerto soloist, Martina has also appeared at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; the Palau de la Música Catalana and L’Auditori, Barcelona; the Palais des Congrès, Strasbourg; the Shanghai Oriental Art Center and Severance Hall in Cleveland. Her recording of Soler sonatas was released in 2011 on the Naxos label.
Baritone Jesse Blumberg is an artist equally at home on opera, concert, and recital stages. Last season he performed the role of the Celebrant in Bernstein’s Mass at London’s Royal Festival Hall under the baton of Marin Alsop, debuted with Boston Lyric Opera as Harlekin in Ariadne auf Naxos, and performed recitals in Paris with the Mirror Visions Ensemble. In 2007 he created the role of Connie Rivers in The Grapes of Wrath (recorded by P.S. Classics) at the Minnesota Opera, and later made his Utah and Pittsburgh Opera debuts in the same production. Other recent appearances include leading and featured roles with Annapolis Opera, Opera Delaware, Opera Vivente, and the Boston Early Music Festival.
In concert, Jesse has been a featured soloist with American Bach Soloists, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, and the Berkshire Choral Festival. He has also given the world premieres of two important chamber works: Ricky Ian Gordon’s Green Sneakers (recorded by Blue Griffin Recording) and Lisa Bielawa’s The Lay of the Love and Death, the former at the Vail Valley Music Festival, and the latter at Alice Tully Hall. He has toured with the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Waverly Consort, and given recitals for the Marilyn Horne Foundation. Last season, he and pianist Martin Katz performed Schubert’s two monumental song cycles, Die schoene Muellerin and Winterreise, over one weekend in Ann Arbor, and they will repeat this pairing in 2011 at Bargemusic in New York City. Jesse has been recognized in many song and opera competitions, and in 2008 was awarded Third Prize at the International Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau, becoming its first American prizewinner in over thirty years.
His 2010-2011 engagements include song recitals in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., debuts with New York Festival of Song, Clarion Society, University Musical Society, Green Mountain Project, and Apollo’s Fire, and returns to American Bach Soloists, Minnesota Opera, and the Boston Early Music Festival. Jesse received a Master of Music degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and undergraduate degrees in History and Music from the University of Michigan.
Jesse is also the founder and artistic director of the Five Boroughs Music Festival,
a new concert series in New York City.
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