(ENGLEWOOD, NJ) -- The Black Box Performing Arts Center invites you to a free live music concert featuring acclaimed local pianist Carolyn Enger. On Sunday, July 11 at 3:00pm, Ms. Enger welcomes European romanticism with “Vienna in Englewood: Music of the 1820’s,” featuring music by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, John Field, Schubert and Chopin.
This event is free to attend, with donations accepted benefitting the Black Box PAC. Reservations can be made online.
Carolyn Enger, concert pianist and speaker, has gained critical acclaim for her deeply felt performances and her thoughtful programs informed by a keen sense of history, identity, and personal connection. Ms. Enger has enjoyed remarkable success as a recording artist: The New York Times selected her Naxos recording of intimate Ned Rorem miniatures, Piano Album I & Six Friends, as one of the newspaper’s “Best In Classical Recordings” for that year, writing “Among the 90th-birthday tributes this year to the essential American composer Ned Rorem, this recording especially stands out,” while Gramophone declared, “Enger raises the miniatures to a higher level.”
Ms. Enger’s touring schedule has brought her to venues throughout the United States and beyond, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, The National Gallery of Art in D.C., Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Nantucket Musical Arts Society, The Kosciuszko Foundation, and the National Gallery in Oslo. Deepening her commitment to multimedia collaborations, Ms. Enger was part of renowned illustrator and writer Maira Kalman’s exhibit “Maira Kalman Selects” at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and her recording of Arvo Pärt’s music was featured in conceptual artist Mischa Kuball’s sound and light exhibit “res.o.nant” at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Recent and upcoming highlights include concerts at the White Stork Synagogue in Wrocław; the German Consulate General in New York; the Bach-Festival in Arnstadt; the Portuguese Synagogue’s Candlelight Concert series in Amsterdam; concerts at Michaeliskirche in Erfurt, Germany; Nikolaisaal Potsdam; KunstForum Gotha; Steinway galleries throughout North America; and a number of recitals in the greater New York area, including a celebration of the work of Ned Rorem at Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Auditorium.
Focusing on the era of World War II, her multimedia project The Mischlinge Exposé combines music, literature, and images that evoke the haunting memories of the Mischlinge – half-Jews and German-Jewish converts in Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust – events reflected in Ms. Enger’s own experience as the child of a Holocaust survivor. Ms. Enger’s project seeks to expand knowledge about the Mischlinge, and deals with her own conversions, issues of “racial purity” and identity, and how crippling discrimination is, societally and personally. Over the past seven years, Ms. Enger has presented this concert-lecture throughout the United States and Europe, at venues including the Museum of Jewish Heritage New York, United States Military Academy West Point, University of Arizona, Middle Tennessee State University, Bristol Community College, Ramapo College, Rowan University, the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center in Providence, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC, Savannah Jewish Federation, the Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts initiative in Texas, and the White Stork Synagogue through the Bente Kahan Foundation in Poland, as well as at dozens of libraries, Jewish community centers, and senior homes. Ms. Enger has contributed a chapter for the forthcoming book to be released in September 2021, Women Defying Hitler: Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Dominated Europe, 1933-1945.
Black Box Performing Arts Center is a non profit arts organization, located at 49 E Palisade Ave in Englewood, New Jersey. Stay tuned for more information regarding future collaborations between Ms. Enger and Black Box PAC.
