Steve Pane & Yuri Funahashi Solo and Four-handed Piano Music

ArtsFarmington is pleased to present a concert by Steve Pane and Yuri Funahashi featuring both solo and four-handed piano music.  It will take place on Sunday March 15^th at 3pm in Nordica Auditorium, University of Maine at Farmington. The suggested adult ticket fee is $20, more if you can, less if you can’t; all are welcome, no one will be turned away.  It is FREE to all UMF students, and FREE to area youth 18 and under through the Arts Inspire Youth fund of ArtsFarmington.  Tickets are available online at artsfarmington.org or at the door.

The concert will be a preview of their upcoming performances at the music conservatories in Pescara and Venice, Italy. The concert brings together an eclectic range of composers whose works reflect connections between Maine and Italy.

The program highlights composers connected to Maine, including José Martinez, Professor of Composition at Colby College, whose Guajeos (2018) draws on the energy and rhythmic vitality of salsa traditions. The duo will also give the world premiere of Doublings (2026), a new work written for Pane and Funahashi by Philip Carlsen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Works by American composer Vincent Persichetti will also be included. Persichetti, a prominent twentieth-century composer and pedagogue, had family roots in Abruzzo, the Italian region where the Pescara Conservatory is located.

The program further celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Venice Music Conservatory with two contemporary compositions: Vincino, ma non troppo (“Close, but not too close”) by Anna Dobrucka (Conservatory alumna) and Variations on Gershwin’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Heaven” by Roberto Gottipavero (Conservatory Director).

Lastly, the theme of water appears in several works on the program including Amy Beach’s Barcarolle and Tobias Picker’s Old and Lost Rivers (1986). These pieces reflect the waterscapes of Maine, Pescara, and Venice, a central theme of the ongoing collaboration between students and faculty at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and the music conservatories of Venice and Pescara, which included a 2024 visit to Maine by Italian students and their professors.

Formed in 1990, the Pane-Funahashi Piano Duo has performed at major venues and academic institutions including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, as well as at numerous colleges and universities. The duo has been a champion of new and collaborative music, premiering works by composers such as Nebojša Jovan Živković, Philip Carlsen, and Jonathan Hallstrom. Most recently, the duo appeared as soloists in a Fall 2024 performance of the Concerto for Two Pianos by Francis Poulenc with the Colby College Symphony Orchestra. Steven Pane is Professor of Music at the University of Maine at Farmington, and Yuri Funahashi is Associate Professor of Music at Colby College.