Eileen Wingard

SAN DIEGO — Fresh from winning gold medals in two major international music competitions, the 13-year-old Israeli cellist, Nahar Eliaz, will be coming to San Diego for a recital Saturday evening, March 7, 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth Am, 5050 Del Mar Heights Rd., San Diego, CA, 92130. The prodigious young talent received the grand prize in the London virtuoso competition which will lead to a performance at the Elgar Room at the Royal Albert Hall in London on April 14 of this year.  She also received two top prizes earlier this month from the Vienna Music Competition. In this contest, Nahar garnered the gold medal in the Strings-Young Artist division, and the Beethoven Centenary Award for the most outstanding performance of a work by the great composer.  Beethoven’s 250th birthday is being celebrated throughout the world. [Eileen Wingard]

Violinist Anat Almani concluded the recent January 28 TICO concert with an impressive performance of the Tchaikowsky Violin Concerto. Her solid technique brought a beautiful patina to the high passages in the first movement; the second movement was a study of muted sweetness; and the final movement lunged forward with unbridled energy. [Eileen Wingard]

The Israeli pianist, Shai Wosner, shone in Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, No. 3, as he collaborated with violinist, Jeff Thayer, concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, and Yao Zhao, the orchestra’s principal cellist. The concert, part of the San Diego Symphony’s celebration of Beethoven’s 250 anniversary of his birthday, featured three of the composer’s early works. It took place on Tuesday evening, January 14, at the new Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center on Fay Street in La Jolla. [Eileen Wingard]

Cellist Alisa Wallerstein’s dramatic, passionate playing was well-suited to the demands of Ernest Bloch’s grandiloquent Hebraic Rhapsody for cello and orchestra, Schelomo. In his musical attempt to present a portrait of the Biblical monarch, Bloch strives to reflect “the Jewish soul, the complex, glowing, agitated soul, that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible.” [story by Eileen Wingard]

The multi-talented Strom, scholar-in-residence at SDSU’s Judaic Studies Department, has brought concerts combining his klezmer forces with international musicians from mariachi, and classical to jazz, from an Afghanistan drummer and an Israeli oud player, to a flaminco dancer. This time, the free concert on Thursday evening, November 7, 7:00 p.m. in Smith Recital Hall on the SDSU campus, will be celebrating the intersection of Jews and Blues. [Eileen Wingard]

By Eileen Wingard CORONADO, California — This past weekend, a new music festival was initiated at the Coronado Library, and concert pianist, Gerald Robbins, brother of  longtime Coronado resident, Bonnie Fox, helped launch the concerts by participating in two of them. At 1 p.m. Saturday, September 21, Robbins performed a solo recital on the Coronado