Tune in on March 28 at 7:30 PM (ET) for a special cello recital featuring works by Faure, Saint-Saëns, Saariaho, and more

We're coming to you LIVE from Switzerland for an exciting cello recital performed by cellist Madelyn Kowalski and pianist Anna Han. A graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Madelyn is currently an artist with the Classeek Ambassador Programme in Switzerland for the 2023–24 season.

A recipient of the Beatrice Huntington Award for Cellists and ABRSM International Postgraduate Scholarship, Madelyn was invited by Steven Isserlis to give a recital at the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad in 2023. There, her performance received the André Hoffmann prize for the best interpretation of the commissioned work for the festival by composer Diana Syrse. A graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a current fellow at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Nova Scotia, she joined the artist roster of the Classeek Ambassador Programme for the 2023-2024 season.

The Violin Channel recently got to know Madelyn in an exclusive interview.

In it, she walked us through what went into her programming for this concert:

"I had such a pull towards wanting to programme the second sonata by Saint-Saëns," she said. "This work is a noble, expansive, and large-scale sonata – yet it also holds extremely magical, intimate and intricate worlds. I wanted to elaborate on this, and so, for the middle of the programme, I chose three pieces that follow one another in succession: two by Fauré, his Romance and Papillon, and a selection from Saariaho’s Sept Papillons. For me, the Romance is like the journey of a single thought; the Papillon, the journey of a single butterfly as it flies through hills and valleys; and the Saariaho Papillons, like intricate views into different scenes of life and nature through the lens of a delicate and ephemeral being, the butterfly.

"The opening piece, the first movement ‘Les eaux’ from Adès Lieux retrouvés, felt like the ideal piece of music to open and reveal the worlds of this whole programme – it holds both a magical intricacy as well as tumultuous vastness as the cello and piano journey together through the experience of water, from minute and intricate ripples to the vast and wild sea."