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Taking inspiration from our exhibition A Feast of Fruit and Flowers: Still Life Painters of the Seventeenth Century and Beyond, Rolf Schulte on violin and Elżbieta Bilicka on piano present a pairing of romances by husband-and-wife composers, Robert and Clara Schumann and pieces composed by siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.  

About the Musicians:  

German-born Rolf Schulte, whom The New Yorker has called “one of the most distinguished violinists of our day,” started playing the violin at age five under his father’s tutelage. He later studied with Kurt Schäffer at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf, attended Yehudi Menuhin’s summer course in Gstaad, Switzerland, and studied with Franco Gulli at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena before moving to the United States to study with Ivan Galamian at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At age 16, he made his orchestral debut with the Philharmonia Hungarica in Cologne, playing Mendelssohn’s Concerto. Under the auspices of Young Concert Artists he gave his New York debut at Town Hall to great acclaim. 

 He has since performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Frankfurt Museums-Orchester, Stuttgart Staatsorchester, Bamberg Symphony, Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice in Venice (in Stravinsky’s Concerto under Robert Craft), RTE Irish National Symphony in Dublin, and the Radio Orchestras of Berlin (RSO), Cologne (WDR), and Stuttgart (SDR). 

 After many years of collaborating with the leading composers of his time, Rolf Schulte happily now returns to the repertoire of his early adulthood, applying the lessons learned from intensive work with living composers, to the music of Schumann, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, Bartók, Janáček, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Webern, Schönberg, Berg, etc. Mr. Schulte performs on a 1780 violin by Lorenzo Storioni, Cremona. 

Pianist Elżbieta Bilicka is the first-prize winner of numerous international competitions, including G-clef (South Korea), Walled City (Ireland), and Putra (Malaysia) and is a laureate of the Olga Kern (New Mexico), Paderewski (Poland) and the NIFC Chopin (Poland) competitions. She was awarded the prestigious “Young Poland” Scholarship from the Polish Minister of Culture in 2018 and 2023. 

 Ms. Bilicka has performed as concerto soloist and recitalist across Poland, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and the United States. Her performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio, Central New York’s Classic FM, Polish TV-Culture and Radio Koszalin. Her debut album, Lights and Shadows (Centaur) received critical plaudits from American Record Guide, Classical Sentinel, and Fanfare Magazine, which praised her “strong poetic streak.” 

Elżbieta Bilicka holds degrees from the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz, Poland, the Haute École de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Manhattan School of Music in New York, NY, where she studied under the tutelage of Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń. Nelson Goerner, and Olga Kern. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies with Nicolas Namoradze.