Two ASU piano students have added prestige to their repertoire.
ASU students Margarita Denenburg and Mark Fuksman are this year's winners of the Joan Frazer Memorial Award in the Arts.
The award is given annually to ASU student musicians or artists who are practicing members of Judaism.
Denenburg and Fuksman each received half of their $1,500 award in January 2003 and will receive the other half tonight.
The two, both Russian-born Israeli piano performance majors, will be performing tonight in a free music recital, the culmination of 10 months of preparation.
"In past years, we have given this award to three or four people, but these two were so superb and exceptional people and performers that we didn't want to give it to anyone else," said David Frazer, 75, founder of the Joan Frazer Memorial Award in the Arts.
Frazer created the award in 2001 to memorialize his wife Joan, who passed away in October 1999.
"She loved music and dancing and was also a committed member to the Hillel Jewish Student Center, so an award that recognizes all of that was very important to me," he said.
Denenburg, 23, will be performing Gideon Klein's 1943 sonata for piano.
Klein composed the piece while at the Terezin concentration camp during World War II. He gave the sonata to his girlfriend for safekeeping while they were both in Auschwitz, and died shortly before the Russians liberated the camp in 1944, Denenburg said.
"The piece has three whole movements, and a fourth unfinished one, which are increasingly more hopeless and full of despair," she said. "He possibly knew his death was imminent, and that is why he gave it away unfinished, so that it would have a better chance of being published."
Denenburg began playing piano at age 5 and has been studying with ASU piano professor Baruch Meir since 2002.
Fuksman, born in Siberia in 1965, also is performing selected piano sonatas by a virtually unknown Russian-Jewish composer, Samuel Feinburg.
"He was a tremendous composer, but was a very modest man with no sense of self-promotion," Fuksman said. "His scores are very scarce -- only about 1,000 of them are around -- and it took me many years to find one so that I could perform it."
Tonight is the U.S. premier of Feinburg's piano sonatas, Fuksman said.
Reach the reporter at annemarie.moody@asu.edu
