Event: A Dance of Life: Violin Music of the AIDS Era
Thursday, November 6, 2025
Greenwich House Music School
Co-presented with ChamberQUEER
About the Event:
On November 6, violinist Giancarlo Latta was joined by pianist Robert Fleitz to present A Dance of Life: Violin Music of the AIDS Era. This recital program revived an important but neglected repertoire of works for violin and piano by composers who died during the AIDS crisis. Co-presented with ChamberQUEER at downtown Manhattan’s Greenwich House Music School, this program brought together seven outstanding compositions written between 1975 and 1991, many of which went unrecorded and have been generally unperformed over the past several decades. Two larger-scale showcase works – Robert Savage’s Rhapsody and Meditation and Louis Weingarden’s Sonata: Les Violons du Bal – sat at the center of the performance, alongside a new transcription for violin and piano of Chris DeBlasio’s Serenade for Violin and Organ, Michael Seyfrit’s A Dance of Life, and shorter works by Charles Buel, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Robert Nofsinger.
About the Collaborators
Fiercely committed to the music of our time, violinist, composer, and writer Giancarlo Latta is interested in the intersection and convergence of music old and new. Through a broad repertoire and bold dedication to wide-ranging collaborative possibilities, he curates projects and programs that explore varied compositional voices and draw threads across styles and centuries. He has performed with flutist Claire Chase and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and in 2022 was the soloist in Tyshawn Sorey’s For Marcos Balter at the Spoleto Festival USA. He performs regularly with many ensembles in New York and across the country, including the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the San Diego Symphony, Contemporaneous, and the Houston-based conductorless ensemble Kinetic, which he co-founded. Latta has been a member of the acclaimed Argus Quartet since 2019, with whom he has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Morgan Library, and many other major chamber music venues across the country.
Robert Fleitz is a pianist, composer, researcher, and performer who views the piano as a space for illuminating what has been overlooked or misunderstood. His performances are idiosyncratic, combining rigor and humor in equal measure. He has performed everywhere from BAM’s Next Wave Festival to Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan to his debut at Carnegie’s Weill Hall to a small cardboard house in a Lower East Side gallery. Recent highlights include The Silent Voice, an album of world-premiere recordings by composers from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; solo appearances with Sinfonietta Rīga; and a residency with Stanford’s composition department. Fleitz studied at the Juilliard School and the Latvian Music Academy and is currently a doctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy, where he explores the embodied experience of hybrid musical environments.
Hailed as “a utopian dream ... [at] the cutting-edge of classical music” (The Nation), ChamberQUEER highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary and historical music, reimagining the classical concert experience as a radically inclusive gathering space & musical community for the 21st century. Founded in 2018 by Jules Biber (cello), Danielle Buonaiuto (soprano), Brian Mummert (baritone), and Andrew Yee (cello), ChamberQUEER operates as a collective of performers, composers, and creators who interrogate and experiment with, or “queer,” European art music’s presumed necessities and existing norms. By crafting new narratives from the canon, democratizing performance etiquette and dress, and shattering the performer-audience binary, we create a fresh and inviting environment for a new generation of music lovers. Learn more at chamberqueer.org.