Eve Wolf - Executive Artistic Director

Eve Wolf, pianist and author, is the Founder and Executive Artistic Director of Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC). For the past eleven seasons Ms. Wolf has written scripts for and performed in productions such as Paderewski in Paris (2001), The Young Arthur Rubinstein (2003), None but the Lonely Heart: The Story of Tchaikovsky & Nadezhda von Meck (2004), Dora: A Case of Hysteria (2005), Tolstoy’s Last Days (2005), and Van Gogh’s Ear (2006), which was also performed in a bilingual (French and English) version at the Festival de Musique de Chambre de Montréal. Ms. Wolf was the scriptwriter for Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of her brother’s shadow, which was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of New York and performed in 2006, as well as for the audio guide of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel Salon in the Exhibition The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons at the Jewish Museum in New York City – an exhibition that received international acclaim. In 2006 Ms. Wolf was commissioned to write Cara, Cara Compagna for the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; she wrote the script in Italian and English, and it was performed in both languages. In the 2006-07 season Ms. Wolf wrote and performed in The Dreyfus Affair and Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare by her Bachelors; the latter was ERC’s largest multimedia work to date. In 2008, she wrote and performed in Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon – the final concert in a series called Imaginings; this multimedia production, presented at the Florence Gould Hall, was the first ERC concert to include video design. In June 2009, she performed in Toscanini: Nel mio cuore troppo di assoluto at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice; this production played to a sold-out audience in an Italian version of the script that she had originally written for ERC’s 2008-09 season, dedicated to Artists in Exile. During the 2010-11 season Ms. Wolf was the featured piano soloist inBeethoven: Love Elegies, which she also wrote.

In August she was Executive Artistic Director for Seduction, Smoke, and Music, a theatrical concert that starredJeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack and that was written and conceived by ERC and Barrett Wissman(Executive Producer) and IMG Artists. Seduction, Smoke, and Music was performed to great critical acclaim in The Tuscan Sun Festival in Cortona, Italy.

Eve Wolf received a BA in Art History from Columbia University and an MA in Piano Performance from New York University. She has taught piano and coached chamber music in New York City for 25 years, has lectured at The Juilliard School, and currently teaches at Columbia University Teachers College and privately. Her seminar,Confronting Memory: Memory techniques for pianists, has been and continues to be presented at many important venues. You are invited to visit her web site: www.evewolfpianist.com.

James Melo - Musicologist

James Melo (musicologist) has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, United States, and Austria, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 70 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfónica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music and Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording on Villa-Lobos’ complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. In 2006, he began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer. In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center. As the musicologist for ERC, Mr. Melo provides historical and musicological support for ERC’s productions in addition to organizing and chairing a series of multidisciplinary seminars at CUNY Graduate Center in partnership with the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation. Mr. Melo’s musicological background has enriched the many historically informed scripts he has written for ERC, including Sublime Sorcery: Music and the Supernatural(2002), A Singing Flame: The Soul of Spanish Music (2002), The Sorrows of Young Werther: A Romantic Liederabend (2003), Schubert’s Dream (2003), Emily Dickinson: Herself to Her a Music (2004), My Heart, My Serpent: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005), Satie, Bohemian from Montmartre: A Cabaret (2006), Chopin: Letters from Majorca (2008), De Profundis: The Trials of Oscar Wilde (2010), and Proust’s Court of Love (2011), among others.

Max Barros - Co-Artistic Director

Max Barros, pianist and co-artistic director of ERC, has won wide acclaim as one of South America’s foremost pianists.

Born in California and raised in Brazil, Mr. Barros was presented with the “Soloist of the Year” Award by the Sao Paulo Music Critics Association. He is also a dedicated champion of Brazilian music, having premiered and recorded several works by the nation’s foremost composers. He is the president of Ponteio Publishing, Inc., a company devoted to the publication and promotion of Brazilian music.

He just recorded Amaral Vieira’s Piano Quintet with the Ensemble Capriccio and is recording for Naxos the complete piano concertos by Camargo Guarnieri with conductor Thomas Conlin and the Warsaw Philharmonic. Mr. Barros has recently toured South America with the Virtuosi di Praga and has been a guest artist with the American String Quartet and the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble.

In 2008 Mr. Barros made his debut at the Caramoor Festival performing Guarnieri’s Concertino for piano and orchestra with the St. Luke’s Orchestra under Michael Barrett.

Donald T. Sanders - Director of Theatrical Productions

Donald T. Sanders, writer, producer, director of theatrical productions for ERC, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded a Thouron Fellowship. He received a C.I.D from the University of Bristol, England, and an M.F.A from the Yale School of Drama where he was assistant to Nikos Psacharapoulos and drama master of Stiles College. Known for his stage adaptations from novels, his Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Old New York by Edith Wharton were both presented by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater. Mr. Sanders has been executive artistic director of MIFA/Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts since 1993. He is also the author of 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness, Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream and Dubrovsky, the opera by jazz composer William Russo. In 2002, he was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France. He has been Director of Theatrical Productions for Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) in New York City since 2005.

Vanessa James - Set and Costume Designer

Vanessa James, set and costume designer, is a designer of sets, costumes, and lighting for the theater and opera and an art director for film and television. She has received an Emmy Citation and two other Emmy nominations. She was the art director for a documentary on the history of the White House directed by Oscar winning director Paul Wagner. Other film credits include Andy Warhol’s Brand X, Ragtime, and The King of Comedy. Her Off-Broadway credits include the revival of Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, Arthur Penn’s production of Chambers and the musical Your Don’t Miss Water by Cornelius Eady. She is currently the chair of Theatre Arts at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of The Geneology of Greek Mythology and Shakespeare’s Geneologies.

Beverly Emmons - Lighting Designer

Beverly Emmons (Lighting Designer) has designed for Broadway, Off-B’way, Regional Theater, Dance and Opera. Her Broadway credits include Annie Get Your Gun, Jekyll & Hyde, The Heiress, Stephen Sondheim’s Passion and The Elephant Man. Her lighting of Amadeus won a Tony award. She has worked at JF Kennedy Center, the Guthrie, Arena Stage, and The Alley Theatre. Off B’way worked with Joseph Chaikin and Meredith Monk. For Robert Wilson; Einstein on the Beach and others. Her designs for dance include works by Martha Graham, Trisha Brown, Alvin Ailey and Merce Cunningham. She has been awarded seven Tony nominations, 1984 and 1986 Bessies, a 1980 Obie for Distinguished Lighting, and several Maharam/American Theater Wing Design Awards. She has curated TheLightingArchive.org and LightingDB.nypl.org; two websites making historical lighting documents accessible to students and scholars on the Interne