Meet Our Sponsor: the Alexander & Buono Foundation

Before tonight's episode, Music as Witness, featuring concert pianist Anna Schelest, we would like to introduce our sponsor, the Alexander and Buono Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting classical musicians through performance, recordings, and artistic development.

The Alexander and Buono Foundation is a nonprofit corporation with a mission to identify the world's most promising classical musicians and help them launch and sustain careers. Co-founders Barry Alexander and Cosmo Buono draw on more than a half century of combined experience in performance, marketing, publicity, and development guidance to help the artists they support. Believing that truly great careers are built with consistent effort applied over time, we have been responsible for helping to launch the careers of more than 500 competition winners through Carnegie Hall debuts, with 8 Piano Laureates being named Young Steinway Artists, a distinction held by fewer than 140 pianists worldwide. Among the artists we are proud to support is the remarkable pianist Anna Schelest. Following her competition win, Anna made debuts at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and the Kennedy Center, all within a single year, and signed a recording contract with Sorel Classics, creating a discography that now includes her 3 Donna Voce recordings made up exclusively of works by women composers. On October 18th at Carnegie Hall, Alexander and Buono will present Anna and her husband Dmitry Shellest as the Shellest Piano Duo in a program with the Brandywine Valley Symphony Strings that will feature works by two living composers, Philip Glass and Ole Bezvorodko, and the American premiere of Bezvorodko's Piano Concerto for Piano Four Hands and String Orchestra. We invite you to learn more about the Foundation's work and the extraordinary art