Acclaimed viola/piano duo to spotlight female composers

Individually, their schedules are crazy; they even live in different states. But classical musicians Molly Carr and Anna Petrova always make time to perform as a duo (“We started this incredible crazy project together,” says Petrova, “and we both threw ourselves 100 percent or more into it without questions”). They’ve been best friends for ages.

“A musician’s life is scheduled years in advance because of concerts and touring,” explains Carr, the violist for New York’s iconic Juilliard String Quartet, and an instructor at both The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music. “So now our time together is very precious.”

Pianist Petrova teaches at the University of Louisville (Kentucky), conducts global master classes and is an in-demand soloist with international orchestras.

The Carr-Petrova Duo performs Wednesday (Feb. 28) in the Palladium Theater’s Hough Hall.

The program, HERS, consists of music by female composers. It is both a nod to Women’s History Month (which starts March 1) and the title of the twosome’s upcoming second album, the followup to 2019’s acclaimed Novel Voices.

They’ve hardly been idle in the interim: Carr and Petrova’s Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project found them visiting refugee camps in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, accompanied by a composer and a filmmaker, listening to and absorbing songs and stories, playing and sharing music. They worked in collaboration with several global aid organizations.

Carr’s non-profit Project: Music Heals Us (PMHU) began taking chamber music to hospitals, homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

And then the duo sold out Carnegie Hall. “Deeply moving … categorically astonishing in its beauty, ensemble, artistry, quality of sound, and almost uncanny ability to draw into the music,” raved the Classical Post.

What to arrange for the next movement?

“Pretty much every year, Anna and I decide to take some time off from life, and dream,” Carr says. “We have a little residency getaway. And we do sort of a life assessment as a duo, to see if the programs we’re doing, the projects we’re doing, the albums we’re aiming at, if these all just light us up the same way they did when we first thought about them. Or we come up with totally new ideas.”

HERS was one of those. “We started dreaming away, and thinking ‘Why do we only have to play classical music? Why don’t we play all the music that we love? And why don’t we make sure that all of the pieces we’re playing have some sort of story that we can tell?’

“When we’d dreamed about what we wanted to be as a team, we wanted to make sure any experience in a concert hall, a refugee center, a soup kitchen or wherever it is that we play, that it’s really more than just ‘OK, sit down and listen and absorb.’ It’s actually ‘Hey, let’s dig into this together, let’s connect to the stories of the people that wrote this music. Let’s enjoy this experience together.’”

The list got bigger, then they whittled it down, then it grew again. “Sometimes,” explains Petrova, “one of us will discover something and then pitch it to the duo. Most of the time we agree on everything we want to play. So in terms of gathering all of the different composers, we knew we wanted to play something by Florence Price – we actually had two of her pieces in our repertoire. Clara Schumann was on top of our list.

“But we also wanted to pull into the project some of our dear friends, living composers who have now already forged their own path as successful composers. Michelle Ross, Vivian Fung, Andrea Casarrubios …”

The latter was commissioned to compose “Magnitude” for the HERS program, based on music Carr and Petrova experienced at a performance from the group known as the Daughters of Jerusalem, women who study music at Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, a Palestinian school.

“We heard that 10 years ago, it was absolutely unheard of for a Palestinian woman to be walking down the street with an instrument on her back,” Carr relates. “It was unheard of for us to hear the type of music we heard in that concert that day.

“They are creating a world where women, if they want to follow their dreams of becoming a musician, it’s allowed and it’s normal. We were blown away by these girls, and by this story.”

And just like that, they had a new project. “As this came together we realized ‘Wow, they’re all female composers,’” says Carr. “It wasn’t actually a goal in the beginning – it was just pulling together music that we loved. We took a look at what we had gathered and we went ‘Oh! These are amazing women with amazing stories. Maybe we should make this a thing.’”

Perhaps the most unexpected piece is “Halo,” an arrangement of the Beyoncé song by pianist and composer (and fellow Juilliard instructor) Henrique Eisenmann (OK, technically he’s not a female composer, but it’s co-credited to Eisenmann and to Beyoncé, who is).

Offers Petrova: “There is a lot of possibility in genre-crossing, and in creating your own style and creating your own piece, as long as the music quality itself is very good. I believe we did that with ‘Halo’ specifically, and with all the other pieces in the program.”

Wherever they go from here, Carr and Petrova have pledged themselves to continue the work of Project: Music Heals Us.

“We do it because it gives us joy,” Carr says. “To be able to remember daily the power of the arts, and to experience it in person, is incredible.

“It’s like the ripple effect – to be able to share it with someone else who doesn’t have access, that changes a person. And that then ripples out to the next to the next to the next.”

To purchase tickets, click here.

Feb. 28 program

Florence Price (1887-1953)

Elfentanz

Clara Schumann (1819 – 1896)

Three Romances for Violin and Piano, arr. for Viola and Piano

I. Andante molto

II. Allegretto

III. Leidenschaftlich schnell

Vivian Fung (b. 1975)

“Prayer” (based on music by Hildegard Von Bingen)

Amy Beach (1867-1944)

Romance for Violin and Piano, arr. for Viola

Beyoncé/Henrique Eisenmann (b. 1986)

“Halo”

Intermission

Andrea Casarrubios (b. 1986)

“Magnitude”

commissioned by the Carr-Petrova Duo and based on music by the Palestinian Women Ensemble Daughters of Jerusalem

Michelle Ross (b.1988)

“Where Things Weigh Nothing at All”

Rebecca Clarke (1886 – 1979)

Sonata for Viola and Piano

I. Impetuoso

II. Vivace

III. Adagio – Agitato