By Coral Gables Gazette staff

The Friends of Chamber Music of Miami closes its 70th anniversary season with a program built around an increasingly uncommon idea in classical music: performers interpreting not only the established canon, but their own compositions.

Clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, and pianist Michael Stephen Brown will each appear Tuesday night both as performers and composers at the Knight Center for Music Innovation in Coral Gables, moving back and forth between Mozart, Bruch, Rebecca Clarke, and works of their own creation.

Earlier eras of classical music assumed composers would also perform. Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin all wrote with themselves at the keyboard or onstage in mind. Modern concert culture has largely separated those roles. Tuesday’s program intentionally reunites them.

The program

The evening opens with Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio, written in 1786 for the unusual combination of clarinet, viola, and piano. Elegant, conversational, and quietly inventive, the piece establishes the central tension of the evening: the relationship between interpretation and authorship.

The rest of the program unfolds almost like a dialogue with that tradition.

Brown performs his Four Lakes for Children (2024) for solo piano. Fiterstein presents Why, a work for solo clarinet of his own composition. Ngwenyama performs Sonoran Storm for solo viola, a vivid and atmospheric work inspired by the Arizona desert that later became the final movement of her Viola Concerto No. 1.

Rebecca Clarke’s Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale for clarinet and viola provides another bridge between eras — music rooted in early twentieth-century chamber traditions but carrying a distinctly modern emotional language. Selections from Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces, Op. 83 close the evening.

Each performer occupies both sides of the stage simultaneously — as interpreter of other composers’ work and as author of their own. That dual perspective gives the program unusual coherence and turns the concert into something more than a standard recital.

The performers

Fiterstein is widely recognized as one of the leading clarinetists of his generation, praised for the warmth and range of his playing and the breadth of his chamber music collaborations. Winner of the Carl Nielsen International Clarinet Competition and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, he also serves as Co-Artistic Director of Friends of Chamber Music of Miami, helping guide the organization through its 70th anniversary season following the death of longtime president Julian Kreeger in 2024.

Ngwenyama has built an international reputation not only as a violist, but as a composer whose work blends vivid imagery, rhythmic intensity, and cultural influence from multiple traditions. Her compositions have been performed by major ensembles across North America, Africa, and Asia, and her artistic career reflects an unusually broad intellectual range spanning performance, composition, and scholarship.

Brown, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the most prominent contemporary examples of the performer-composer tradition. A pianist equally comfortable with canonical repertoire and original work, he has been described by The New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”

The occasion

The concert closes the 70th anniversary season of Friends of Chamber Music of Miami, one of South Florida’s longest-running chamber music organizations. Founded in 1955, the organization has spent seven decades presenting internationally recognized musicians while helping sustain chamber music as a living art form in Miami.

This season included appearances by the New York Philharmonic String Quartet, violinist Benjamin Beilman, and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. Tuesday’s finale serves as a fitting conclusion — a program centered not only on technical performance, but on artistic creation itself.

The evening ultimately asks audiences to hear chamber music differently: not as a fixed historical tradition preserved behind glass, but as something still evolving in real time through the musicians performing it.

The concert takes place Tuesday, May 19, at 7:30 p.m. at the Knight Center for Music Innovation at the University of Miami Frost School of Music. The performance is presented by Friends of Chamber Music of Miami in collaboration with the Frost School of Music and with support from the City of Coral Gables.