Richard Herriott and Winona Zelenka - Music for Autism
Music was what brought them together when, as eager young members of the gifted program at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto in the early 1980s, Richard Herriott and Winona Zelenka found themselves part of a hand-picked cadre of budding musicians. And music is what reunites them, after years apart and careers on opposite sides of the pond.
Zelenka is well known to readers of The WholeNote as a chamber and orchestral musician. Herriott is less so, although some will remember his November 6, 2011 appearance at Walter Hall in a moving tribute concert to the memory of Antonin Kubalek.
Both will be performing in the intimate surroundings of St. Stephen in-the-Fields Anglican Church on November 29 in a program featuring Benjamin Britten’s Cello Sonata (beloved by Zelenka), folk song settings by Vaughan Williams and the Canadian premiere of Herriott’s Rock Piano Concerto without Orchestra, subtitled “An Electric Organ, a Ladder and a Persian Rug.”