Palm Beach Symphony Chamber Music Series Launches New Season

Palm Beach Symphony Chamber Music Series launches its season with a screening of the award-winning film I Am Not a Rock Star and a performance featuring the film's subject, Julliard-trained concert pianist Marika Bournaki, on Wednesday, January 22. The screening is at 5:30 p.m. followed by the concert at 7 p.m. in the Stiller Family Foundation Auditorium at the Norton Museum of Art, 1450 Dixie Hwy., West Palm Beach.

The program features Poulenc's Sextext for Piano and Wind Quintet and Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-Flat Major. Masters of the keyboard, both composers created the pieces so that they could perform them with woodwinds. Bournaki is joined by Nadine Asin, flute; Robert Weiner, oboe; Anna Brumbaugh, clarinet; and Luciano Magnanini, bassoon as well as Alex Ozolins, French horn.

Bournaki began her piano studies at the age of five and four years later, she was soloist with Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17. She has performed recitals at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Greece, Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico, New York's Carnegie Hall, the National Arts Center in Ottawa, the Flanders Festival in Belgium, the Konzert Accordate Series in Aachen Germany and the Luminato Festival in Toronto as well as in South Korea, Romania, Italy, Switzerland and England.

I Am Not a Rock Star was awarded the Canadian Screen Award for "Best Performing Arts or Arts Documentary Program" and "Best Picture Editing in a Documentary Program or Series." The 2012 documentary was also named "Best Youth Theme Feature" by the Eugene International Film Festival 2013.

Noting that the documentary will appeal "even to audiences not interested in classical music," the entertainment industry newspaper Variety reported "...things become increasingly involved when bilingual Bournaki leaves for New York and blossoms into an independent-minded woman and artist, a development that ushers in some entertaining diva antics."

Tickets are $25-$50 and are available online at PalmBeachSymphony.org; by phone at (561) 281-0145; or by visiting the Palm Beach Symphony Box Office, Monday-Friday from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

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