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Acclaimed violinist Marka Young, director of string ensembles and instructor of violin and viola at Lafayette, will join organist Lorenz Maycher and soprano Anneliese von Goerken to perform a recital at 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26, in Lafayette’s Colton Chapel.
Free and open to the public, the concert will include works by Handel, Vierne, Vitali, Callahan, Faxon, and Borowski.
Young performs as a recitalist and chamber musician on the modern and baroque violin. She has been heard throughout the northeastern United States and Canada and in Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to her concerts, Young performs regularly with the ensembles Artek and Rebel, as well as the American Classical Orchestra and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. She has been a member of the Stony Brook Quartet, BIS (a 20th century music ensemble), and Princeton University’s Composers’ Ensemble. Young has appeared at the Banff, Bach Aria, Music Mountain, and Storm King music festivals.
Young holds master of music and doctor of musical arts degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her violin teachers include Joyce Robbins, Dorothy Delay, and Camilla Wicks. She has been an instructor at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division. Each summer, she teaches violin and viola at Summerkeys, a music vacation for adults in Lubec, Maine.
Maycher is assistant organist at St. Francis of Assisi Church, and assistant organist at Church of the Holy Family, both in New York City. He was organist at the historic First Church of Christ, Scientist, New York City, for ten years, where he played the church’s 1903 Hutchings-Votey pipe organ. A native of Oklahoma, he has studied organ with Margaret Lindsay, Thomas Matthews, Clyde Holloway, and William Watkins, and is a graduate of Rice University. While a student at Rice, Maycher won the Gibbons prize in organ, placed first in the San Antonio Pipe Organ Competition, and won the Houston AGO’s Mary Ellen Bond Award.
In 1989, Maycher was a featured recitalist at the Organ Historical Society national convention held in New Orleans. He has since been invited to play for six OHS national conventions, and was recipient of an OHS E. Power Biggs Fellowship in 1990. He has given over 50 recitals in such places as Wichita State University, Rollins College, Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania, The Frick Collection, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Philadelphia’s Lord and Taylor Department Store (on the Wannamaker Grand Court Organ).
In recent years, Maycher has participated in several projects devoted to the music of Leo Sowerby. In 1994, he recorded an all-Sowerby disc on the landmark 1949 Aeolian-Skinner organ at First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas, for Raven Records. He has participated in Sowerby festivals in Chicago, New York, Richmond, and Worcester, Massachusetts.
A natural entertainer and gifted singer, Goerken has quickly captured audiences with her remarkable talents. Her voice has been lauded as one of exceptional beauty, size, and versatility, coupled with a rich, full-bodied, velvet quality. Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, von Goerken made her debut with Arizona Opera as Madame Goldentrill in Mozart’s The Impresario. A showstopping appearance as Queen of the Night led to engagements as Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos and Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor. Most recently, having moved into the full lyric repertoire, she has performed in such roles as Mimi in La Bohème, Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte and Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus with such companies as Bronx Opera, Tacoma Chamber Orchestra, St. George’s Choral Society, and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan.
Performances with the Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra, Tacoma Youth Symphony, Evergreen Music Festival, Washington-Idaho Symphony, and in England led to premieres of several new works, including an appearance with The Center for Contemporary Opera in New York City. Von Goerken’s music education took her to Arizona State University and post-graduate study with Virginia Zeani at Indiana University in Bloomington. Currently, she works privately with Charles Riecker of the Metropolitan Opera Company.