Irina Nuzova – Alexander Bedenko – Wolfram Koessel

Irina Nuzova, Wolfram Koessel, and Alexander Bedenko perform Beethoven, Brahms, and Rota on Saturday, June 6 at 7:00 PM

Music at the Southfield Church opens its 10th season on Saturday, June 6, 2026 at 7:00 PM with an evening of clarinet trios, performed by three musicians whose careers span the world’s most celebrated stages. Pianist Irina Nuzova, cellist Wolfram Koessel, and clarinetist Alexander Bedenko will perform works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Nino Rota at the historic Southfield Church, 234 Norfolk Road, Southfield Village, New Marlborough, Massachusetts. Admission is free.

THE PROGRAM

The evening opens with Beethoven’s Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11 — one of the composer’s most joyful early chamber works, written at a time when Beethoven was still dazzling Vienna with his brilliance and audacity. Its three movements, from the bright Allegro through the lyrical Adagio to the playful set of variations that closes the work, showcase the clarinet as a fully equal voice in the ensemble — a relatively new idea in Beethoven’s day, and a thrilling one still.

Brahms’s Clarinet Trio in A minor, Op. 114 follows — a late masterpiece written after the composer had declared his intention to retire from composition. The arrival of clarinetist Richard Muhlfeld changed his mind, inspiring a series of works that are among the most autumnal and deeply felt in the chamber repertoire. Its four movements move from brooding intensity to tender lyricism, with a gentle Andantino grazioso and a fleet, resolving Allegro to close.

The program concludes with the Trio by Nino Rota — a composer best known to many as the voice behind Federico Fellini’s films and The Godfather, but whose chamber music reveals an entirely different dimension: witty, warmly melodic, and suffused with an Italian sense of song. The Trio’s three movements — Allegro, Andante, and Allegrissimo — offer the perfect close to an evening that has traveled from Beethoven’s Vienna to Brahms’s autumn to Rota’s shimmering Mediterranean light.

THE ARTISTS

Irina Nuzova is a native of Moscow who trained at the Gnessin School and Gnessin Academy before continuing her studies at the Manhattan School of Music and The Juilliard School. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the Hartt School of Music. As soloist and chamber musician, she has performed at the Phillips Collection and National Gallery in Washington, D.C., Weill and Merkin Recital Halls and Barge Music in New York, the Schubert Club in St. Paul, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, among many other venues. She is currently on the faculty of the Special Music School at the Kaufman Center in New York.

Wolfram Koessel has been a member of the world-renowned American String Quartet — quartet-in-residence at the Manhattan School of Music — since 2005, and performs regularly at Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the Concertgebouw, and leading halls around the world. His collaborators have ranged from Zakir Hussain and Salman Rushdie to Broadway legends Chita Rivera and Ute Lemper, and he served as Music Director of the Mark Morris Dance Group from 2004 to 2008.

Alexander Bedenko, a graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music, has been called by Gramophone Magazine a clarinetist whose tone is “the most luxurious velvet.” The Ukrainian-born American artist has appeared at Carnegie’s Weill Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Steinway Hall, the Kennedy Center, and UNESCO in Paris. He has served as guest principal clarinetist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — at the personal invitation of Riccardo Muti — and has performed in that capacity with the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra, among others.

Concerts are free. A retiring offering is collected as patrons exit, and an ice cream social on the lawn — weather permitting — follows each performance. The Southfield Church is located at 234 Norfolk Road in Southfield Village, New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Music at the Southfield Church is supported in part by the New Marlborough Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the generous members of The Sostenuto Circle. For more information, visit thesouthfieldchurch.org or email music@thesouthfieldchurch.org.