Baryshnikov Arts Center Celebrates Misia Sert with Pair of Concerts This Week

The Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) continues its 10th anniversary celebratory year, presenting Celebrating Misia Sert, two BAC Salon concerts featuring baritone Michael Kelly and pianists David Fung and Roman Rabinovich in music by Satie and Ravel tonight, December 16 and tomorrow, December 17 at 7:30pm. This is the second in two sets of concerts in December which honor renowned arts patrons from early 20th century Paris - De Noailles' Bal Masqué will be presented by BAC on Wednesday, December 2 and Friday, December 4 at 8pm, featuring baritone Tyler Duncan and a world premiere by Mark Applebaum (www.bacnyc.org/performances/performance/masked-ball).

BAC Salon is a series of concerts presented in a salon setting, without a division between stage and auditorium. This series takes music written for intimate spaces, jazz and classical alike, back to its natural setting. BAC strives to make live music more integrated in the everyday lives of busy New Yorkers by presenting these hour-long programs with no intermission and by keeping ticket prices affordable.

On December 16 and 17, the program includes Satie's Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and Ravel's Histoires naturelles and La valse. The concerts are dedicated to Misia Sert, a supporter and confidante to the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Misia Sert, muse and patron of painters, composers, choreographers and writers was a pivotal figure in early 20th century arts world in Paris. Born in St. Petersburg and brought up in Brussels and then Paris, Sert was surrounded by music from the beginning of her life - Franz Liszt was a family friend and played a concert in their house and her first piano teacher was Gabriel Fauré. Sert's first husband, Thadée Natanson, introduced her to painters including Renoir, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vuillard who painted her portraits and Marcel Proust who recreated Sert as Princess Yourbeletieff and Madame Verdurin in his Remembrance of Things Past. After short second marriage to industrialist Alfred Edwards, Misia met her third husband, Jose-Maria Sert in 1908 and he introduced her to Sergei Diaghilev. Misia Sert became one of Diaghilev's biggest supporters and confidantes.

Of the concerts' theme, BAC Artistic Administrator Pedja Muzijevic says, "Art cannot sustain itself without the generous support of art patrons. Yet, after a while, they fall into obscurity and become a name on top of the music score to whom the work is dedicated or a footnote in a music history book. In this particular case, Princesse de Polignac (who we celebrated in our November concert), Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles (who will be celebrated with our Masked Ball concerts on December 2 and 4), and Misia Sert were as fascinating as many of the artists they supported. This series of concerts will weave their stories with music and the musicians they supported. It is also our small token of gratitude for their passion, dedication and generosity that gave us some of the most iconic works of the first half of 20th century."

These BAC Salon concerts give a further nod to this era and to the salon setting by exhibiting Cocteau's drawing of Diaghilev and set and costume designs by Benois and Bakst from The Mikhail Baryshnikov Collection, 107 drawings and paintings gifted to BAC by BAC's Founder and Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov. Baryshnikov's interest and fascination with the world of visual art started in the 1970s, when he began to assemble a variety of small-scale works on paper. He gave his collection to the organization in 2013 as a means of broadening the scope of BAC's activities. One of the collection's notable aspects is stylistic diversity, including realism, impressionism, surrealism, and some works of theater, set, and costume design. (For more information, visit www.bacnyc.org/projects/project/the-mikhail-baryshnikov-collection.)

Leadership support for music programming in 2015 provided by the J.C. Flowers Foundation and the Thompson Family Foundation.