Math & Cultural

This is a lunchtime free concert event, taking place for 45 minutes in MSRI's Simons Auditorium. This concert is open to MSRI's summer visitors as well as the general public.

Musical program:

• Piano Sonata No. 8 in B♭ major, Op. 84 (Sergei Prokofiev)
• Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (Ludwig van Beethoven)
• Rondeau fantastique sur un thème espagnol "El Contrabandista" S. 252 (Franz Liszt)

Location: Simons Auditorium, MSRI, 17 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720

Time: 12:45-1:45 PM

Please note: No food or beverages, other than water, are allowed in Simons Auditorium.

Theodora Serbanescu Martin is a concert pianist and a second-year PhD student in the Musicology program at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. She currently studies piano with Xak Bjerken, and her past mentors include Martha Wasley, Hans Boepple, and Carmen Enescu. She holds B.A.s in Music and English and a minor in German Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

​Equally passionate about piano performance and academic research, Theodora divides her time between several musical activities such as performing, writing, teaching, researching, and reviewing, and is invested in encouraging active collaboration between scholars and performers. She often travels between California and New York and performs throughout the U.S. and abroad.

​Theodora engages with various research topics such as Brahms and the history of virtuosity, lateness and Beethoven/Mahler, carnal musicology, disability studies, and her broader interests extend to German aesthetics, affect theory and gender studies. Her most significant research projects to date consist of undergraduate theses for both majors: her music thesis, “Brahms’s Piano Exercise Mode and the Politics of Friendship,” which sought to reclassify Brahms's paradoxical virtuosity in relation to his engagement with dialogic music-making, won a Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research, and her English thesis, “A Poetics of Performance: Agency, Voices and the “I” in Wyatt’s Poetry,” traced the intertwining textual and performative agencies in Thomas Wyatt’s poetry in order to reveal the relations and fissures between the speaker, or the “I” of the lyric, and “the text.” 

​Her performance awards include first place in the Pacific Musical Society, American Fine Arts Festival, Young Pianists’ Beethoven and MTAC Concerto competitions, and the 2016 Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley. She has attended numerous summer festivals throughout Europe such as the International Piano Academy in Freiburg and the Dublin International Festival, and participated in master classes with professors such as John O’Connor, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Seymour Lipkin, Katarzyna Popowa-Zydron and Jura Margulis. Theodora has performed numerous standard and non-standard concertos in the U.S. and abroad, including Brahms’s Second, Beethoven’s Fourth, Prokofiev’s Second and Scharwenka’s Fourth; some of the orchestras she has worked with include the UCBSO, Saratoga Symphony, Kostroma Symphony Orchestra and the Lublin Chamber Orchestra. 

Theodora also reviews concerts for Bachtrack and Peninsula Reviews, and she is a scholar of the 2nd Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. 

Parking Information: Guests may use UC Berkeley's Hill Shuttle service (cost: $1/ride without UC identification), or park using the PayByPhone permit system to park in the SSL parking lot (rate: 50 cents/hour; payment can be made via smartphone app, phone, or web). Guests choosing to use PayByPhone may register using MSRI's Guest Wireless network once in the building, however you will need your license plate number to do so.

For more information, please contact Jennifer Murawski at jmurawski@msri.org.