DEERFIELD — The Brick Church Music Series will continue at the First Church of Deerfield on Sunday, Oct. 19, at 3 p.m. when pianist Pih-Hsun Shih and cellist Tanya Anisimova reunite for another collaboration.
According to Shih, the pair first met in 1990 while pursuing master’s degrees at Boston University. After hearing Shih on the piano, Anisimova asked her to perform with her in North Andover, Shih’s first collaboration in the U.S. since immigrating from Taiwan.
“Our lives took us in different directions,” Anisimova said over the phone. The collaborators played separately across the country for about 20 years until Shih spotted a poster with a familiar face hanging in a library near the University of Hartford where Shih teaches.
“I contacted the librarian and I said, ‘I know this cellist,'” Shih recalled. “Turns out [Anisimova] needed a pianist.”
Then, in 2012, the pair played together again in Carnegie Hall.
“If you collaborate with people, you change the music ideas,” said Shih, who has played with countless musicians through the years. “You get inspiration from different artists.”
Why does she think she and Anisimova collaborate so well?
“It’s the chemistry,” Shih said simply.
Behind the chemistry are two musicians with similiar mentalities, Anisimova said. Despite Anisimova moving from Russia and Shih from Taiwan, Anisimova said they both grew up respecting, admiring and trusting their teachers.
“We came from that traditional, older way of acquiring knowledge,” Anisimova said, adding that this informs their dynamic. Instead of arguing in between pieces at rehearsal, they listen.
“We trust one another,” Anisimova continued.
Anisimova and Shih each played their first note at 7 years old. Shih stressed piano lessons were her choice from the start, not her parents’ plan.
“They just let me go along and do whatever I wanted. They were very supportive,” Shih said. As an introvert, Shih said she never thought twice about spending hours alone with the keys, even as a 7-year-old. “It speaks to my personality,” she said with a laugh.
Anisimova described her connection to her cello as a relationship.
“There’s no other instrument like this; it’s a human being,” Anisimova said. “It does look like a person, it looks like a beautiful lady and it sounds like a person. Its voice is very similar to a human voice — that’s why I love it.”
But she joked that the relationship is not always a sweet song.
“Of course, [my cello’s] very old, so it’s like an oldie. Sometimes it’s capricious. In the dry winter … it’ll cough and sneeze and refuse to work and then I will ask it nicely. I’ll beg it, especially if a concert is coming,” Anisimova said, chuckling.
Besides the cello, Anisimova also plays the piano, occasionally sings during her improvisations, composes her own pieces and even paints.
“Like her website says, she is a Renaissance woman,” Shih said.
For Anisimova, her passions exist on the same plane.
“The arts are all facets of the same divine essence in us,” Anisimova said. “It’s one beautiful bouquet.”
On Sunday, Shih and Anisimova will play together again with a program of classical works by J.S. Bach and Johannes Brahms, and “Requiem for the Innocent,” a work Anisimova composed herself. The roughly 80-minute program will finish with “Arpeggione” by Franz Schubert, a favorite of Brick Church Music Series Coordinator Jean Pitman Turner and Anisimova’s husband, painter Alexander Anufriev, who died last October.
“This is, in a way, his memorial concert,” Anisimova said. “The work we’re going to play is strongly connected to him.”
Suggested donations are $20 at the door as a fundraiser for the First Church of Deerfield. A reception will follow at Deerfield Academy’s Caswell Library. Handicapped parking is available toward the back of the church.