Research Associate Professor Jonah Sirota, the violist of the Chiara String Quartet, will present a faculty recital on Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Recital Hall. The recital is free and open to the public.
In anticipation of the release of his first solo album, “Strong Sad,” composer and violist Sirota will present a recital of his own works for solo violin, along with viola pieces by University of Nebraska–Lincoln Assistant Professor Greg Simon and Rodney Lister, who is currently on the faculties of Boston University and the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory.
Sirota has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise final funding to release the album, which is scheduled to be released in June on National Sawdust Tracks.
“We lose things every day—cell phones, keys, old parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown. Sometimes we lose big things, but more often they are small. There needs to be a soundtrack for the little losses. That’s ‘Strong Sad,’” Sirota writes in the introduction for the Kickstarter campaign.
Sirota asked seven composers to write elegies to those daily moments of loss and wrote one himself. Each of the pieces was newly created for the project. The recording began in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June 2016 and was completed in Reykjavik, Iceland, in November 2017, with support from faculty grants from the Hixson-Lied Endowment and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Faculty Research Council.
“The elegy as a musical form has often found a home in the plaintive middle-register voice of the viola,” Sirota said. “The viola tugs at our core and makes us aware of our inner landscape. On the ‘Strong Sad’ recording, instead of the big catastrophes, the viola will mourn the small, everyday losses. While some of these works may refer to lost friends and loved ones, this project will reaffirm that mourning is too important to save only for funerals, and that sadness, when given a chance to breathe, can be our best path to deep and lasting joy.”
The tracks on the album will include:
• Kurt Knecht and Jonah Sirota (Mondegreen): CURRENTly
• Valgeir Sigur∂sson: Nebraska
• Rodney Lister: Quodlibet
• Jonah Sirota: When You Lose You Win
• A.J. McCaffrey: Here Come The Waterworks
• Paola Prestini: Vento e Sole
• Robert Sirota: Elegy for a Lost World
• Nico Muhly: Lean
The album also features guest performances by violist Nadia Sirota (Jonah’s sister) and pianist Molly Morkoski.
Sirota is known as a solo and chamber music violist of great range and depth. After making his solo debut at the age of 17 with Alan Gilbert and the Juilliard Pre-College Symphony, he won concert competitions at both Rice University and at the Juilliard School and was a third prize winner in the 2006 Naumburg Viola Competition.
Sirota is also the violist of the Chiara String Quartet, known for playing repertoire “By Heart,” without printed music. The Chiara Quartet serves as Hixson-Lied Artists-in-Residence in the Glenn Korff School of Music. They announced last fall that this would be their final season as a quartet after 18 seasons together. Members will continue as faculty in the Glenn Korff School through the 2018-2019 academic year.
To learn more about “Strong Sad” or to contribute, visit the Kickstarter page at https://go.unl.edu/xmhe.