Hafey & Kraus Piano & Cello Recital
The Arts at Sheridan College presents Brooks Hafey and Sonja Kraus Piano & Cello Recital on Thursday, March 14 at 7pm in Kinnison Hall at the Whitney Center for the Arts.
Free and open to the public.
Dr. Brooks Hafey has been dazzling audiences with his exceptional musicianship and refined technique since boyhood. He has performed in a wide range of venues in the United States including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York City. Overseas performances include concerts in France, Italy, and Norway. In addition to his career as a soloist, Dr. Hafey is an active chamber musician, collaborative artist, and conductor. In 2008 he made his debut as an opera conductor in Novafeltria, Italy with Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and has returned to Italy in recent summers to conduct Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. Dr. Hafey’s wide-ranging repertoire spans from the works of French Baroque masters Jean-Philippe Rameau and François Couperin to the composers of the twenty-first century. An advocate of contemporary piano composition, Dr. Hafey has presented a lecture recital of Ghost Variations, by American composer and Grawemeyer Award-winner George Tsontakis. In early 2016 he gave the world premieres of Joshua Keeling’s Gravitons and Neutrinos.
Dr. Sonja Kraus, a native of Germany, is an internationally acclaimed cellist, teacher, and music scholar, whose concertizing and teaching career has taken her through Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Currently, Kraus holds the position of Assistant Professor of Cello/Bass at the University of South Dakota and is the cellist in the renowned Rawlins Piano Trio. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of South Dakota, Kraus was the Cello Professor at the Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo as well as the principal cellist of the Orquesta Filarmónica Municipal de Guayaqul in Ecuador. Kraus holds her bachelor’s in Cello Performance and Pedagogy from the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart (Germany) as well as a master’s and doctoral degree from the Jacobs School of Music – Indiana University Bloomington where she studied with Prof. Emilio Colón, the 2017 Artist of the year by the New York Classical Music Society.
