Benefit Concerts for Communities Without Borders featuring
Triple Helix Piano Trio
Belmont Festival Orchestra, Nathaniel Meyer, conductor

Beethoven, Triple Concerto
Mendelssohn, “Reformation” Symphony

Two performances:

Friday, January 27, 8 pm
First Church in Cambridge
11 Garden St.
Cambridge, MA

Sunday, January 29, 3 pm
First Unitarian Society in Newton
1326 Washington Street
Newton, MA

Tickets: Adults $30, Students $15

When the award-winning and internationally known Triple Helix Piano Trio musicians—violinist Bayla Keyes, cellist Rhonda Rider, and pianist Lois Shapiro—joined together in 1995, The Boston Globe described the results of their union as “the livest live music in town,” with “wildly imaginative, emotionally charged, virtuoso playing” that was “sophisticated in musical detail, wholeheartedly interactive, uninhibited in emotion, and touched by a special grace.” Subsequently, the ensemble has become known as one of the best piano trios on today’s musical landscape.

The Belmont Music Festival and the Belmont Festival Orchestra were established in 2010 to bring free orchestral concerts directly to the citizens of Belmont and nearby communities, seeking to cultivate new audiences with exciting performances of the most beloved works of the classical repertoire. Since then, the Belmont Festival Orchestra has developed a passionate local following, performing for packed audiences at their home in Belmont’s Beech St. Center and now in other venues around the Boston area. A group of friends, the all-volunteer orchestra includes professional, amateur and conservatory players, united by their belief in the transformative power of music and grass-roots community-building through the arts.

Conductor Nathaniel Meyer is currently working as the musical assistant to his teacher and mentor, Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. Nathaniel recently returned from a seven-week tour of Europe, in which he assisted Maestro Zander in engagements throughout Spain, Estonia, England, Israel and Sweden. In addition to his musical education, Nathaniel studied German and philosophy while a student at Yale and in Heidelberg, Germany. He received his Masters degree in Orchestral Conducting from Indiana’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, where his teachers were David Effron and Arthur Fagen. There, he began to study opera conducting, with a special focus on the music of Richard Wagner. Nathaniel has also studied in masterclasses in Europe with renowned Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi and Jorma Panula of Finland. Before an embouchure injury led him to take up conducting, Nathaniel was an award winning trumpeter, performing frequently as a soloist and taking first place at the National Trumpet Competition and the International Trumpet Guild in 2007. Since then, he has been the winner of Yale’s Wrexham Prize in Music, the Artistic Excellence Award from Indiana University, and the LaGuardia Conducting Competition.