The Mesa-Yakushev Duo’s career was launched in part by their extremely successful showcase for presenters at Weill/Carnegie Recital Hall, the result of winning the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ highly competitive 2017 Young Performers Career Advancement audition.

Since then, they have performed across the U.S., receiving reviews such as this in the Palm Beach Daily News: “The pair’s playing was grounded in storytelling, as great musical performances often are . . . Mesa and Yakushev always played on equal footing, never with the piano serving as the accompanist to the cello . . . a musical performance that encapsulates the best that good drama has to offer.”

Cuban-American cellist Dr. Tommy Mesa was the recipient of Lincoln Center’s 2025 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Sphinx Organization’s 2023 Medal of Excellence, its highest honor. Mesa has appeared as a soloist at the Supreme Court of the United States on four occasions and with major orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Indianapolis, Madison, New Jersey, San Antonio, and Santa Barbara, among others. He gave the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto, Divided, in 2022 and has been its exclusive soloist since, performing at major halls across the USA and Brazil, including Miami’s New World Center, Nashville’s Schermerhorn Center, and Carnegie Hall. His orchestral recording début of the work was released in July 2023 on Deutsche Grammophon.

In addition to serving as Artist in Residence with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in 2024-25, recent orchestral highlights include débuts with the Delaware, Glacier, and Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestras as well as the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, a return to the Madison Symphony, and performances with the Calgary and Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestras and the Ann Arbor, Columbus, Greenwich, Knoxville, Quad City, and Reading Symphony Orchestras. He performed the rarely heard Lucid Dreams by Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock with the Windsor Symphony.

His website is https://tommymesa.com.

Ilya Yakushev has performed in prestigious venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall (New York), Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco), Sejong Performing Arts Center (Seoul), and Victoria Hall (Singapore). He has performed concertos with the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Boston Pops, Rochester Philharmonic, Utah Symphony, and many others. This season, dozens of engagements bring Ilya from New York City to Hawai’i for recitals, concertos, and chamber music, including collaborations with the Beo String Quartet, violinist Stefan Milenkovich, and members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

The New York Times raved, “Yakushev was little short of heroic,” and the San Francisco Chronicle chose Ilya’s performance with the San Francisco Symphony as one of the top 10 classical music events of the year, writing “The young Russian pianist made an astounding triple début . . . playing [Prokofiev’s] 1st and 4th Concertos and the Seventh Sonata with vigor and virtuosity.” The American Record Guide called him “one of the very best young pianists before the public today.”

Winner of the 2005 World Piano Competition in Cincinnati, Ilya received his first award at age 12 as a prizewinner of the Young Artists Concerto Competition in his native St. Petersburg.

Ilya studied with legendary pianist Vladimir Feltsman at the Mannes College of Music in New York City.

His website is www.ilyayakushev.com.

Program notes:

Debussy:

Although they represent only half of a projected series of works, Debussy’s three chamber sonatas bear testimony to the composer’s developing identification with a more abstract—that is, less visually, textually, or otherwise extramusically oriented—musical process.  The first of these works, the Sonata No. 1 for cello and piano (1915), is cast in three movements, the last two of which are played without a break. The Prologue opens with a noble keyboard statement in D minor, well defined harmonically (an unusual feature in Debussy’s music) and tinged with modal color, to which the cello provides a highly ornamental response. The entire movement is but 51 measures in length, yet encompasses a wealth of expression. Throughout, musical phrases are allowed to develop and collapse with no clear boundaries; as with much of the composer’s later music, the distinction between melody and ornamentation is deliberately obscured.

The saturation of the ensuing Sérénade with the cellist’s percussive pizzicati came as a great shock to Parisian audiences of Debussy’s time. The few bowed passages that invade the texture quickly dissolve away, save for an outburst of triplet rhythms midway through the movement. The bass staccati in the piano serve to make the occasional melodic, legato inserts all the more powerful. The finale, marked Animé, follows without pause. At 123 bars, it is of greater length than the two previous movements together. Although in performance its quicker tempo compensates for its proportions to some degree, a great deal of the Sonata’s musical weight is invested in this energetic movement. Debussy calls for the cello to play with a “light and nervous” character, while he includes no fewer than 17 tempo indications that emphasize the psychological tension. The music builds to several climaxes, only to have the bottom drop out each time in one of Debussy’s favorite musical strategies. The cello makes a final passionate, unaccompanied melodic plea, as at the beginning of the entire work, before the Sonata concludes in a flurry of great percussive strength. —Blair Johnston

RACHMANINOFF:

Rachmaninoff composed his collection of 13 songs, Op. 34, in 1912, but it was only three years later that he added a “song without words” as a closing piece, intended to be sung using a single vowel of the singer’s choosing. Vocalise soon outshone the other songs in terms of popularity and renown.  This expressive, melancholy piece has circulated in countless arrangements.

Without any illustrative lyrics to convey the song’s meaning, the piece takes on a personal meaning as well as a universal expressivity: to quote critic Richard Wright, “As a metaphor for nostalgia, homesickness, and erotic yearning, nothing says it better.”

With its glorious melody and lack of text, Vocalise has proven to be an ideal piece for transcription: since its first performance in 1916, numerous arrangements have been made for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, duos, and solo instruments.

DAY:

Dr. Kevin Day is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary composer, jazz pianist, and conductor based in Las Vegas. Internationally acclaimed as a leading musical voice, Dr. Day’s work is known as a vibrant exploration of diverse musical traditions from contemporary classical, cinematic, jazz, R&B, soul, and more. Dr. Day takes inspiration from a broad range of sources, including romanticism, late 20th-century music, jazz fusion, and gospel. Across all areas, his work explores the complex interplay of rhythm, texture, and melody across genres.

Dr. Day burst onto the musical scene in 2018 with his Concerto for Euphonium, which has since gone on to become a Classic FM sensation. Since then, some of the world’s top instrumental soloists, ensembles and orchestras have commissioned and performed his works, including the Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Las Vegas Philharmonic, Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, Dallas Winds, U.S. Coast Guard Band, “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band, U.S. Navy Band, U.S. Air Force Band, Boston Brass, Tesla Quartet, Castle of Our Skins, Puerto Rican Trombone Ensemble, Sheffield Chamber Players, and many others in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Dr. Day is the recipient of numerous awards, including the BMI Composer Award, 3rd Prize of the Alexander Zemlinsky Prize in Chamber Music Composition, a Copland House Residency Award, and the MacDowell Fellowship for Music Composition. He was also a three-time ASCAP Morton Gould Finalist.

Dr. Day’s first opera, Lalovavi, will premiere at the Cincinnati Opera in July 2026 as the lead work in its ground-breaking initiative to engage Black creators in developing new works. Other recent works include his acclaimed Concerto for Wind Ensemble and Echoes, as well as Ignition, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Low Brass, and Fires Unquiet Within, a double concerto for violin, cello, and chamber orchestra.

In addition to his work as a composer, Dr. Day also enjoys an active career as a jazz pianist, bringing his extensive musical background to the stage and studio as an improviser and collaborator.

He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree in Composition from the University of Miami Frost School of Music.

His website is www.kevindaymusic.com.

The composer writes: “My first Cello Sonata was composed in the summer of 2016, after a profound lesson with composer Frank Ticheli. At that lesson, he encouraged me to expand and discover a new harmonic language, one that finds balance between atonality and tonality. This was my first attempt at doing this, and it allowed me to try things that I hadn’t done in previous works.

From this attempt came a composition divided into three movements that explores different timbres of the cello and how it beautifully melds with the piano accompaniment.

The second movement of this sonata is dedicated to my niece Naomi, who was born during the composition process of this work.”

MASSENET:

Jules Massenet was a French Romantic composer best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty.

Although it is often performed as a concert work, the achingly beautiful strains of the Méditation originated in the opera house as an intermezzo to be heard during a scene change in Massenet’s masterpiece, Thaïs. The story follows the life of the famed Alexandrian courtesan Thaïs and the monk Athanaël, who has come to convince her to renounce her sinful life. She is driven to hysterics by the monk’s words, seeing emptiness in her life and the approach of old age, until she collapses.

The famous Méditation that follows her collapse depicts her conversion to a life of piety. The opera ends tragically, as Athanaël, having successfully converted her and returned to his monastery, is tormented by what he realizes is love for the former courtesan. He returns to Alexandria to find her dead and confesses his love and desire for her to the unhearing ears of her corpse. Originally composed for solo violin and orchestra, Méditation has been arranged for almost every instrument imaginable. —John Glover

LECUONA:

Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist, many of whose works have become standards of the Latin, jazz, and classical repertoires. His over 600 compositions include songs and zarzuelas as well as pieces for piano and symphonic orchestra.

Malagueña was originally the sixth movement of Lecuona’s Suite Andalucía (1933). The malagueña originates in the flamenco dance style of Málaga in southeastern Spain, hence its name. The piece has since become a popular jazz, marching band, and drum and bugle corps standard and has been provided with lyrics in several languages.

The melodic themes that form the basis of Malagueña were not of Lecuona’s invention, having been prominent in Spanish folk songs named “malagueñas” for several centuries.