STEPHENVILLE, Texas — Four internationally distinguished musicians — pianist Nefeli Mousoura, violinist Ivo Ivanov, violist Pierre Lapointe and cellist Allan Steele — will perform in a guest recital at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 10, at Tarleton State University’s Clyde H. Wells Fine Arts Center. Admission is free.
Mousoura, a native of Greece, gave her debut recital at the Salzburger Festspiele in July 2019. She regularly performs in Greece, Austria, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States and has toured throughout China. She shares her time between Salzburg and Athens, where she gives recitals, chamber music concerts and performs with several orchestras.
She won the Campillos International Competition in Spain and the prestigious Prize for Young Pianists awarded by the Academy of Athens. She has received scholarships from the Onassis Foundation, the Education and European Culture Foundation, the Athens Megaron Music Friends Society and the Gina Bachauer Foundation.
Ivanov started musical study at age 6 in the pre-college conservatory of his native city of Rousse, Bulgaria, and continued his studies at the State Academy of Music in Sofia. A member of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, he recently joined Tarleton’s School of Liberal and Fine Arts as a violin and strings Adjunct Professor.
He has appeared internationally and as a soloist and part of the Sofia Philharmonic and Fort Worth Symphony in the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and North Korea, and in Carnegie Hall, New York City, in 2008 and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2018.
Lapointe is an international touring musician and the violist of the acclaimed Escher String Quartet; he cofounded the group in 2005 while studying at the Manhattan School of Music. He earned his DMA from the Manhattan School of Music in 2012 after writing his thesis on the unusual structure of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Second String Quartet. Almost simultaneously, he finished a two-year recording project of the complete cycle of quartets that he wrote for the Naxos label.
Steele, also with the FWSO, studied at the Music Institute of Chicago for four years and was a longtime member of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. He studied with Tanya Carey, Hans Jensen, Susan Moses and, most recently, Ronald Leonard at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, where he graduated with a bachelor’s of music.
He maintains an active solo career and has played with the Chicago Youth Symphony, the Northwest Symphony, the Colburn Conservatory Orchestra and the American Youth Symphony. He is a founding member of the classical music group MC2.
A founding member of The Texas A&M System, Tarleton State is breaking records — in enrollment, research, scholarship, athletics, philanthropy and engagement — while transforming the lives of nearly 17,000 students in Stephenville, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan and online. True to Tarleton’s values of excellence, integrity and respect, academic programs emphasize real world learning and address regional, state and national needs.