Spy Arts Diary: Rising Stars and a Long-Dead Painter We Never Knew by Steve Parks

The matinee performance is billed as a “Stars of the Next Generation” concert. But these three young musicians are already stars of their own generation.

On Sunday, February 5, Chesapeake Music presents violinist Randall Goosby, violist Natalie Loughran, and pianist Zhu Wang — all in their mid-20s — in a program of works by Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, and Florence Price at the resplendent Ebenezer Theatre concert hall in downtown Easton.

Randall Goosby has performed with big-name orchestras from all over the United States and Europe – including the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and London Philharmonic. And this year, he will stretch his performance map to another continent with concert dates in Japan and South Korea. His precocious resume includes his debut with the Jacksonville Symphony at age nine and the New York Philharmonic at 13. He is the youngest winner ever of the Sphinx Concerto Competition and later a recipient of Sphinx’s Isaac Stern Award. A graduate of Juilliard, Goosby continues his studies for a distinguished Artist Diploma under the tutelage of Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho, co-artistic director of Chesapeake Music’s annual chamber music festival.

Goosby will perform Florence Price’s Two Fantasies, accompanied by pianist Wang and, after intermission, in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for Violin and Viola, with Loughran and Wang.

Natalie Loughran won first prize in the 2021 Primrose International Viola Competition and the BIPOC (Biracial Indigenous or People of Color) Composer’s Prize for her arrangement and performance of “Mother and Child” by African American composer William Still Grant. In addition to her work as a concert soloist, Loughran regularly plays with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. She will pair with Wang on Schumann’s Fantasiestucke, Opus 73.

After his Carnegie Hall debut, pianist Wang’s recital was named “The Best of 2021” by New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini. And as the 2020 Young International Artists Audition winner, he earned the Stern Young Artist Development Award in the name of the Linda and Isaac Stern Foundation.

All three will perform together on the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante.

“Stars of the Next Generation” concert, 2 p.m. February 5, Ebenezer Theater, 17 S. Washington St., Easton; chesapeakemusic.org

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The annual Annapolis Film Festival doesn’t return until March 23. But in the meantime, the festival screens a very timely and important documentary – “The Educational Divide: The Story of East Side High” — highly relevant to Black History Month. After a federal judge ordered the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, to merge its two separate but unequal high schools, found to violate Brown Vs. Board of Education, the community is faced with how to deal with the ruling. Until very recently, we may have thought that Roe v. Wade was “settled” law. Now we’re left to wonder if Brown is the law of the land. Are our public schools allowed to continue racial segregation or not? Can we put our faith in the U.S. Supreme Court to do the right thing? How long does a precedent have to exist before it is unassailable? Your guess is as good as mine.

This high court decision came down in 1954 – nearly two decades earlier than Roe Vs. Wade. What’s next? Abolishing same-sex marriage? Interracial marriage? How about making only white male landowners eligible to vote? That’s how it was in states-rights interpretations of the original Constitution. Even free black men who may have owned land counted only as three-fifths of a person. Personally, I’m not sure bigots who might favor this could do the math.

“The Educational Divide: The Story of East Side High,” 7 p.m., Feb. 8, Maryland Hall’s Bowen Theatre, Annapolis, annapolisfilmfestival.com

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Imagine. An emerging Impressionist artist you never heard of – much less seen any of his art. I confess. I didn’t know anything about Giuseppe De Nittis until I read about him in the Washington Post. And now I can’t wait to see his under-discovered paintings at the venerable Phillips Collection museum in D.C. De Nittis was born into a wealthy family in largely impoverished southern Italy. Making his way to Paris as a young man, he hobnobbed with the likes of Degas and Manet before making his debut in the historic first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He died of a stroke at age 38, just ten years later.

From the few online images of his art, I say with some assurance that he had great facility as a painter with an eye for capturing scenes that inspired him to paint them. I love Impressionists and their fellow travelers I’ve seen at the Phillips – especially Pierre Bonnard, who helped bridge Impressionism to Modernism. But there is that impression – forgive the word assimilation – that you’ve seen it all before. And while I never tire of seeing, for instance, certain favorite movies, I am looking forward to discovering for myself an accomplished Impressionist painter whose work I have never experienced in a museum. 

“An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis,” Through February 12, Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., NW, Washington, DC.,

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts and editor now living in Easton.