New and Noteworthy
The Alexander & Buono Foundation is pleased to announce the list of artists currently receiving our ongoing support. We believe careers are built with consistent effort applied over time, so we have selected laureates from our previous competitions demonstrating the desire, talent, and promise needed to ensure they are capable of sustaining professional careers.
We ask that you contribute generously and often to our work on their behalf.
June 6, 2025
Presented in collaboration with the Alexander & Buono Foundation.
Three plays of Shakespeare, Othello, Falstaff, and Macbeth, inspired works by Verdi, who considered the last of these the greatest opera of the twenty-seven he composed.
Bellini in turn used Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the inspiration for his famous bel canto opera, I Capuletti e i Montecchi.
Operas like these went on to capture the imagination of Franz Liszt, who wrote transcriptions based on these and other works, thus demonstrating not only his generosity as a fellow composer, but a desire to help spread the melodies of great music throughout the world.
Please join us on Friday, June 6, 2025 at 6:30 PM for “The Power of Inspiration,” a concert featuring pianist Nana Miyoshi, soprano Celeste Siciliano, and bass Philip Phillips that will explore the ways in which these composers used their skills to create masterpieces that remain as exciting and relevant as they did when they were first written. The evening will include performances of Liszt’s Rigoletto Fantasy and Reminiscences of Norma, as well as arias from Verdi’s Macbeth and Bellini’s famous Casta diva.
Friday, June 6, 2025
6:30 PM
Columbus Citizens Foundation
“THE POWER OF INSPIRATION”
SHELEST PIANO DIO
Friday, June 6, 2025
June 6, 2025
Pianist Nana Miyoshi will make her Carnegie Hall solo recital debut on Sunday, May 3, 2026. Preparations for this event are already underway, and in a recent interview with Barry Alexander, she discusses the many ways she is preparing. Please click here to read the interview.
Anna and Dmitri Shelest join forces as the Shelest Piano Duo for a performance on Friday, June 6, 2025, at 7:30 PM for the Rossmoor Music Association in Monroe Township, NJ. The program includes:
Bernstein/Harmon: Overture to Candide
Copland/Lerner: Variations on a Shaker Melody
Chaminade: 5 Pièces romantiques
Bonis: Femmes de légende (Song of Cleopatra)
Saint-Saëns/Shelests: Samson et Dalila (Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix)
Saint-Saëns/Liszt/Horowitz/MacDonald: Danse macabre
Akimenko: 6 Pièces Ukrainiennes
Gershwin/Levine: Rhapsody in Blue
NANA MIYOSHI MAKES HER SOLO RECITAL DEBUT AT CARNEGIE HALL
May 3, 2026
Past Events
SOPRANO CELESTE SICILIANO
IN CONCERT
May 24, 2025
Dramatic Soprano Celeste Siciliano presented a concert of works by Liszt, Medtner, Stravinsky, Beach, Bridge, Hahn, and Gurney & Clarke as part of a concert entitiled Spring Song. She is also one of the guest artists performing for The Power of Inspiration, featured below.
About Our Artists
Nana Miyoshi
Ever since she was three years old Nana Miyoshi has lived life with one single goal: to become a concert pianist. Now, at age seventeen, it is a dream she is working every day to turn into a reality.
From the very beginning her commitment has been absolute. Playing and studying in her native Japan since the age of three, before applying to the Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition in 2019 and winning First Prize at age eleven, she has been a student of Steinway Artist Cosmo Buono since that time, and continues to hone her technique, while building the vast repertoire of piano literature which she knows she will need, in order to take her place on the world stage.
She listens and absorbs not just what she learns in her lessons, but also from the world around her. Everything she sees, every mile she travels, even what she eats is an experience helping her becoming a better musician.
She already knows that it can take many years to become an overnight success, and that in order to achieve her dreams she is going to have to be consistent. Daily practice at the piano; a vast historical knowledge of composers and their works; an understanding of their influences and motivations—all inform her studies on a constant basis, with the road to career success being traveled one experience and one note at a time.
Anna Shelest
Hailed by The New York Times as a pianist of “a fiery sensibility and warm touch,” Anna Shelest is an international award-winning artist who has thrilled audiences throughout the world.
A champion of esoteric repertoire, since 2017 she has been collaborating with the legendary conductor Neeme Järvi to record rare works for piano and orchestra. Their complete set of Anton Rubinstein’s piano concerti has been released to great acclaim, praised by the American Record Guide as “Easily the top choices now for these two concertos [Nos. #1 & #2]” and Gramophone for “power and agility, effortless effect, nuanced and incisive all round [#4 and Caprice Russe].
The 2019 release of Donna Voce a survey of music by women composers from the last three centuries, has become Anna’s ongoing musical project that includes live performances, lectures and videos, as well as a sequel albums- Donna Voce II featuring Fanny Mendelssohn’s monumental piano cycle Das Jahr (“The Year”) and Donna Voce III: Concerti.
Shelest Piano Duo
The husband-and-wife team of Dmitri and Anna Shelest, known as the Shelest Piano Duo, began musical training in their native Ukraine. Praised by Fanfare Magazine for their “stirring performances of rare repertory,” they made their Carnegie Hall debut under the auspices of the Alexander & Buono Foundation in February of 2018, with their CD release of Ukrainian Rhapsody bringing renewed attention to the music of their homeland.
The CD was also named Album of the Week and played on radio stations nationwide.
Their inventive programs have brought them everywhere from concert stages to state functions, prompting former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon to say they “realized diplomacy through music.”
A growing interest in the works of women composers has led to recordings of a series of CDs entitled Donna Voce ((The Voices of Women), Sorel Classics, available on amazon.com), the third of which was released last month, featuring collaborations with Maestro Neeme Järvi and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Also included are Cécile Chaminade’s Concertstück, and a suite of piano four hands music with Dmitri and Anna at the keyboard.