Simona DeFeo, Executive Producer.
Ms. DeFeo has over twelve years of combined experience in managing large scale cultural and organizational development projects both in the private and public sector. Leveraging her corporate experience and passion for the arts for the past five years, Ms. DeFeo has been working on using the power of music as catalyst for innovation and social change. Her repertoire of cultural projects includes producing concerts and planning music festivals in the United States, Italy, Israel and Russia. Simona also advises business leaders on resilience and organizational strategy when not working with artists. Her clients have included Citi, Goldman Sachs, US Senate, TIAA-CREF, Wachovia, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Johnson and Johnson and many others. In her spare time, Simona can be found in the dance studios of Manhattan and writing poetry. Ms. DeFeo and Elisha Abas, Artistic Director of the series, envisioned intimate gatherings as a means of sharing the music and the stage with friends. Rather quickly it evolved into the series which will be continuing in 2011 - 2012.
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Elisha Abas, Artistic Director
Elisha Abas’s playing was recently described by the Berliner Morgenpost as “his performance of Mozart piano concerto No. 23 sounded sophisticated and lush, as if two old masters devoted themselves to the late work of godlike Mozart”. National Public Radio in Europe commented on the same performance in Berlin in 2010 by saying “Abas executed his solo passages with acute expressivity and pearly precision”. Elisha Abas a native of Israel has been performing as a concert pianist since the age of five with luminaries such as Zubin Mehta, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein. He was the protégé of Artur Rubinstein and life-long student of Pnina Salzman, Israel’s First Lady of Piano (herself a student of Alfred Cortot). Abas is also the great great grandson of legendary Russian Composer, Alexander Scriabin. Elisha Abas has performed throughout the world and most recently in the US, Israel, Italy, China, Russia, Cuba and Germany. In 2009, he recorded the First Piano Concerto of Johannes Brahms in Havana, Cuba with The National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba and Yoel Gamzou. In 2010, he was featured as a soloist in the highly acclaimed and publicized final concert of the Jewish Culture Days in Berlin 2010. This sold out concert attracted enormous press and public attention world-wide and resulted in two imminent recording contracts with prominent German labels. In 2011, Abas will release a solo album featuring mazurkas, polonaises and waltzes of Frederic Chopin and the music of Ronn Yedidia, including his own work.
