The Schumanns and the Mendelssohns with Rolf Schulte, violin and Elżbieta Bilicka, piano

Tickets: $25 / $20 members

Taking inspiration from the exhibition A Feast of Fruit and Flowers: Still Life Painters of the Seventeenth Century and Beyond, Rolf Schulte (violin) and Elżbieta Bilicka (piano) present a pairing of romances by husband-and-wife composers Robert and Clara Schumann and pieces composed by siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.

About the Musicians:

Rolf Schulte

German-born Rolf Schulte, whom The New Yorker has called “one of the most distinguished violinists of our day,” started playing the violin at age five under his father’s tutelage. He studied with Kurt Schäffer at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf, attended Yehudi Menuhin’s summer course in Gstaad, and studied with Franco Gulli at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena before moving to the United States to study with Ivan Galamian at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At 16 he made his orchestral debut with the Philharmonia Hungarica in Cologne, playing Mendelssohn’s Concerto, and he gave his New York debut at Town Hall under Young Concert Artists.

He has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Frankfurt Museums-Orchester, Stuttgart Staatsorchester, Bamberg Symphony, Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice in Venice (in Stravinsky’s Concerto under Robert Craft), RTE Irish National Symphony in Dublin, and the radio orchestras of Berlin (RSO), Cologne (WDR), and Stuttgart (SDR). After many years collaborating with contemporary composers, he has returned to repertoire from his early adulthood, applying those experiences to works by Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, Bartók, Janáček, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Webern, Schönberg, Berg, and others. Mr. Schulte performs on a 1780 violin by Lorenzo Storioni, Cremona.

Elżbieta Bilicka

Pianist Elżbieta Bilicka is the first-prize winner of numerous international competitions, including G-clef (South Korea), Walled City (Ireland), and Putra (Malaysia), and is a laureate of the Olga Kern (New Mexico), Paderewski (Poland), and NIFC Chopin (Poland) competitions. She was awarded the “Young Poland” Scholarship from the Polish Minister of Culture in 2018 and 2023.

Ms. Bilicka has performed as concerto soloist and recitalist across Poland, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and the United States. Her performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio, Central New York’s Classic FM, Polish TV-Culture, and Radio Koszalin. Her debut album, Lights and Shadows (Centaur), received positive notice from American Record Guide, Classical Sentinel, and Fanfare Magazine, which praised her “strong poetic streak.”

She holds degrees from the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz, the Haute École de Musique in Geneva, and the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where she studied with Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń, Nelson Goerner, and Olga Kern. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies with Nicolas Namoradze.