Upper Valley Music Center presents a faculty concert featuring Rose Hegele, soprano, and Roseminna Watson, violin. The program will feature music for violin and soprano that scrapes the inner and outer edges of emotional experience, including the music of György Kurtág, Kaija Saariaho, Juhi Basal, Rose Hegele, Missy Mazzoli, and Gustav Holst.

ARTIST BIOS

Canadian soprano Rose Hegele explores the extremes of human vocal and artistic expression in 20th and 21st century music. Active across genres – including avant garde music, contemporary opera, and chamber music – Rose creates healing spaces for audiences to embrace their complexity and humanity. She has performed at venues including Boston’s Symphony Hall, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Carnegie Hall. Recent highlights include performing as “Gloria (Double)” in Tod Machover’s opera VALIS at MIT in September 2023, premiering William Thomas McKinley’s “The Recycler ” with the Lugano Percussion Ensemble on their 2023 US tour, performing Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” with Lowell Chamber Orchestra in October 2022, and performing a split bill recital with pianist Sarah Cahill at the Center for New Music (San Francisco, CA) in July 2022. Dedicated to education through artistry, Rose has presented masterclasses at Brown University, Roger Williams University, Frost School of Music, Berklee College of Music, Clark University, Wildflower Composers Festival, and Boston Singers Resource. A collaborative tour de force, Rose is committed to working with others in diverse musical environments. She is a founding member of Der Gestanke Pierrot Ensemble, Peridot Duo, and Into the Light Ensemble, and sings with Nightingale Vocal Ensemble and Vox Futura.

Violinist, singer, composer and multimedia artist Roseminna Watson is fascinated by the human body as a vehicle that can carry us closer to the divine. Her artistry across mediums is imbued with a haunting immediacy and poignant nostalgia. She is a member of the Providence-based new music collective Verdant Vibes and founder of the Pandemic Polyphony project —an ever-expanding platform for collaborative connection between creators of all kinds across the boundaries of physical distance and
isolation (pandemicpolyphony.org). She is the co-founder and curator of the Cape Cod concert series
MUSIC IN THE STUDIO in collaboration with painter Cammie Watson and half of Humming Owl —
a duo with her singer/songwriter/sitarist husband, Pablo Escalante. She holds a B.A in Visual Art from
Yale University, an M.M. in Violin Performance from Stony Brook University, and an A.D. in Chamber
Music from San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is the former first violinist of the prize-winning Aiana String Quartet. Ms. Watson has recently performed the world premieres of her most recently-
completed original works — Divinatum Dolorem for piano,violin and voice, and Rooms of the Body for string quartet. You can find her solo album, Limbic Hymnal (2017) at roseminnawatson.com.