A CONCERT OF PAN-EUROPEAN LATE 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

ARTISTS

Victoria Martino
Victoria Martino studied in California, Massachusetts, and Australia with noted American and European pedagogues representing the major traditions of violin playing. While enrolled as a full scholarship student in the DMA program at USC (class of Eudice Shapiro), she was offered positions in two renowned Viennese chamber ensembles: the early music group Cappella Academica, and the Ensemble Eduard Melkus. During the ten years that she spent in Austria, Ms. Martino founded and toured internationally with her own ensembles: a duo with Italian guitar virtuoso Piero Bonaguri, and a versatile chamber group, the Albertina Soloists, whose members came together from the United States, Italy, and Hungary.

As a violin soloist and chamber musician, Ms. Martino has performed throughout Europe, Australia, Japan, and North America. Drawing upon her unusual background in music, art history, and literature, she has initiated and presented a number of interdisciplinary programs (lecture-concerts) at many international institutions, including the Guggenheim Museums of New York, Bilbao, and Berlin, the National Art Gallery of Victoria (Australia), the National Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada), the National Art Gallery of Slovenia, the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Albertina in Vienna, the J. Paul Getty Museum and MOCA Los Angeles, to name only a few. Since 2004, she has presented an annual five-week lecture-concert series at the Athenaeum Music and Art Library in La Jolla on the interrelationship between music and art throughout history.

Regarded as a specialist in early (Baroque violin) and contemporary performance practice, Ms. Martino has a broad repertoire spanning five centuries. Her reputation as a proponent of the "Wiener Klangstil," a unique Viennese approach to sound production and musical interpretation, led her to develop a number of programs specifically dedicated to Austrian music. One of these, her annual "Mozart Marathon," an eight-hour performance of all 26 violin sonatas with pianist James Lent,
has been presented to public and critical acclaim in La Jolla and Los Angeles.

Ms. Martino plays an original Baroque violin (Michael Andreas Bartl) from 1760 and a (modernized) violin by Jakob Stainer from 1670.

James Lent
Pianist James Lent holds a doctorate in music from Yale University. A resident of Los Angeles, he is one of the most sought-after accompanists in California. He has served on the faculty of the Colburn Conservatory of Music, USC, and the Music Academy of the West. Mr. Lent has been collaborating with Victoria Martino since 2005, performing an extensive repertoire for violin and keyboard, ranging from the Renaissance to the present day.

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