Baune and Clasquin Back in the USSR

Renewing a performing partnership that goes back more than a decade, violinist Terrie Baune and pianist Deborah Clasquin headline a program of works by Dmitri Shostakovich and other Eastern European composers of the Soviet era.

The recital they are calling “Behind the Iron Curtain” begins at 8 PM on Saturday, September 13 in the Fulkerson Recital Hall on the HSU campus in Arcata.

Baune and Clasquin are reuniting, Clasquin said, “to perform an early love: chamber music.” That’s especially fitting since that’s how they met. “We've been a duo since 1997,” Clasquin recalls. “We met at a Sequoia Chamber Music Workshop for talented kids, held every summer at HSU.”

Joining Baune and Clasquin on a rarely heard piece by Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya will be Paul Cummings on clarinet. The program concludes with the Piano Quintet by Shostakovich, also featuring Karen Davy (violin), Nicholas Marlowe (viola), and Carol Jacobson (violoncello.)

In addition to music from the Soviet Union itself, Baune and Clasquin will play a work by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski.

When they first performed in 1999 in San Francisco, reviewer Stuart Canin wrote of their debut, “Baune and Clasquin made a fine team, presenting the music in a straightforward manner and letting the music itself make its own points.”

These days, Terrie Baune is Concertmaster of the North State Symphony based in Chico and Redding, and Co-Concertmaster of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. She is the Associate Director of the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshop and a faculty member of the Sequoia Chamber Music Workshop, both summer programs at Humboldt State University. Baune is also a member of two professional “new music” chamber ensembles: the San Francisco-based Earplay Ensemble and the Empyrean Ensemble, which is in residence at UC Davis.

Deborah Clasquin has become one of the North Coast’s most popular performers, as well as a prominent teacher and arts education advocate. She is professor of Music at HSU, and has been nominated as a Distinguished Teachers in the Arts by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. She enjoys an active career as a recitalist, having appeared in Moscow, Paris, Kiev, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Tickets for the September 13 recital in Fulkerson Hall are $8 general, $3 students and seniors, from HSU Ticket Office (826-3928) or at the door. A Faculty Artist Series concert sponsored by the HSU Music Department.