Music Mansion in Miami

Below, please find the full story that appeared in a recent publication of The Miami Herald highlighting our intense solo performance program "Music Mansion," held each winter in Miami, Florida. The almost full-page article was complete with several wonderful photos, including the one above of a participant practicing in the mansion's

Article:

MUSIC
South Florida mansion strikes the right chord with young classical musicians

BY ELINOR J. BRECHER

At an Italianate villa near Dadeland Mall, there’s a fiddler on the roof.
There’s also one in the master-bathroom shower and another in the dining room.
There are cellists in the laundry room, in closets, on the pool deck. Wherever there’s a vacant nook in, or atop, a nine-bedroom estate called Casa Florence, there’s a kid with a stringed instrument. Melodies blend and clash, as 21 string players work at their pieces.

It’s mid-afternoon Thursday, and the students attending the Philadelphia International Music Festival’s classical music “boot camp’’ are wrapping up five days of nonstop practice. They are as young as 10, as old as 18, from places like Tucson and Tempe, Ariz., Bellingham, Wash., Bethlehem, Penn., and Grosse Point, Mich. Two came from Broward County, one from Palm Beach Gardens. Some grew up in music, the children of concert professionals and teachers. Others simply showed talent early, and have non-musician parents who recognized it.

The camp, called Music in the Mansion, is run by Sandy and Richard Marcucci, a Philadelphia couple who used to run basketball camps but switched to classical music when their older daughter, now 24, took up the violin as a child. During the summer, they run 17-day intensive programs at Bryn Mawr College, featuring a faculty assembled from the famed Philadelphia Orchestra.

This is their fourth year in South Florida for the shorter winter version, which includes faculty from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, and former campers as practice coaches, including Madison Marcucci, the recent Juilliard graduate who spurred her parents’ career change.

The program caters to intermediate and advanced string players who might have heavy metal and hip-hop on their iPods but are serious students of music more commonly associated with their grandparents’ generation: Brahms, Bach and Bériot. That would be Charles Auguste de Bériot, the 19th Century French composer. Joyce Liu, a precocious, 10-year-old fifth-grader from Oak Hill, Va., planned to play Bériot’s “Violin Concerto No. 9 in A Minor, Opus 104” for an audience of about 40 at a recital Thursday evening, during which each student will solo.

“I started when I was 5,’’ said Joyce, who has graduated to a half-size violin, and isn’t sure whether she’ll turn professional. “I have no further knowledge of any career plans,’’ she said. Although she’s the youngest, Joyce said she felt “comfortable’’ among the camp of mostly teenagers.“I’ve improved so much,’’ she said.

The students, who pay $1,600 for all expenses except travel, practice five hours a day, with short breaks to cannonball into the heated pool, and for meals prepared by a professional chef. They’re stashed in every bedroom and on cots in giant walk-in closets, and have discovered great acoustics in the odd spaces, like a below-stairs powder room with a bidet.

Sandy Marcucci, 51, found Casa Florence on the Internet. The 11,000-square-foot, white marble-lined party venue is owned by builder Renzo Maietto, who initially thought he was dealing with a crazy person when Marcucci asked if she could install 21 young musicians, parental chaperones and a rented piano there for five nights and six days. But once she explained her mission, Maietto, who grew up in Milan “with Vivaldi in my house,’’ was eager. “We should cultivate this music’’ among teens, said Maietto, 65, of Coconut Grove.

Skye Kinlaw, a 16-year-old Baltimore-area high school junior, was the fiddler on the roof, where she said she felt “so much freedom — on top of the world.’’
 She was 3 when her father, a pharmacist, took her to a music store and placed a “teeny, tiny’’ violin in her hands. Now she studies at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Swapping her T-shirt for an emerald green evening gown, she performed Pablo de Sarasate’s “Malaguena” for the recital. Although most of the kids were strangers until days ago, Skye said the bonding was “instant.’’

“The camp opened a completely different world to me,’’ said Jason Karlyn, 22, now a practice coach. “There are some very gifted people here.’’
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/22/2558432/south-florida-mansion-strikes.html#storylink=cpy