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LEWISTON — Ksenia Kostelanetz will present the fourth annual “Frank Glazer Memorial Steinway Concert” at the Gendron Franco Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 23.
Glazer, who played the inaugural concert on the Center’s Steinway piano in 2006 and returned every year to present solo concerts, died in January 2015, weeks shy of his 100th birthday. Ksenia was his youngest student and took lessons from him for several summers while in Maine.
Kostelanetz, who spends her summers with her family in Greene, is only 17, but plays like a seasoned virtuoso, organizers of the show said.. She was born in Indianapolis to a musical family of immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia. The family resides permanently in Wisconsin.
Among the musicians in Kostelanetz’s family was the conductor Andre Kostelanetz, best known to modern audiences for a series of easy listening instrumental albums on Columbia Records from the 1940s until 1980. In the 1920s, he conducted concerts for radio. In the 1930s, he began his own weekly show on CBS, “Andre Kostelanetz Presents.”
Ksenia Kostelanetz began her piano lessons at age 4 and has studied with Sue Medford, Glazer, Chiharu Naruse and Stephen Swedish. She had master classes with concert pianists Andre-Michel Schub and Alan Feinberg. Fluent in French and Russian, she has attended school in France and visited France and Russia several times. She will attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall. She plans to become a neonatologist.
The free “Frank Glazer Memorial Steinway Concert” will open the 18th season at the Gendron Franco Center and will be held in the performance hall, which now houses two Steinway grand pianos donated to the center. Kostelanetz will perform pieces by Schubert (Impromptu Op. 142 No. 3, Musical Moment No. 3, his Liszt Ave Maria, Serenade, and Der Muller und der Bach) and Chopin (Barcarolle, Fantasie Impromptu, Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1, and C# Minor Nocturne Etude Op. 25 No. 1)
“We will once again present this season-opening performance as a gift to the community and hope that everyone will attend,” said Mitchell Clyde Thomas, the executive director, “Ksenia is a very special friends to the Franco Center and we are thrilled that she is willing to help us remember another great friend, Mr. Glazer.” The doors will open and the bar will be open at 6 p.m.
No tickets are needed for this free concert, but anyone may call 207-783.1585 with questions about this concert or anything happening at the Center, located at 46 Cedar St. in the Little Canada section of Lewiston, just across the Lown Peace Bridge from New Auburn. The Gendron Franco Center is handicap accessible.
