A Concert by Dr. Sara Davis Buechner & Friends
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Join us for a very special concert from Greenwich House Music School’s German Diez Memorial Piano Chair, Dr. Sara Davis Buechner on Friday, February 27. 2026. Doors at 6:30 pm, concert at 7 pm in the 2nd floor concert hall at 46 Barrow Street. General Admission tickets are $20, student and older adult (60+) tickets available for $15.
Dr. Sara Davis Buechner will be joined by special guests Katherine Needleman, oboist and William Wen, pianist to present Une Soirée avec Francis Poulenc. The program will include:
- Sonata for Piano Four Hands (1918, revised 1939)
- Sonata for Oboe and Piano (1962)
- Les Soirées de Nazelles, Suite pour Piano (1936)
Katherine Needleman:
Katherine Needleman is a musician from Baltimore, Maryland, whose musical life began in the once-robust public school music programs, where she played violin, clarinet, oboe, keyboards, and percussion. At sixteen, she dropped out of high school to attend the Curtis Institute of Music, and later had a brief, instructive relationship with the Juilliard School that ended shortly after she won its oboe concerto competition. She has been playing the oboe professionally for a long time now—long enough to notice how her relationship to visibility, inclusion, and power in the field has changed over time.
She is the principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music. Her interests center on the relationship between composers, performers, and the stage. Recent highlights include accompanying her cellist daughter in the Haydn C-major Concerto at a middle-school assembly, a recital that felt unusually right at a retirement home outside Philadelphia, and an 8am Kansas performance of her works Stolen Prophet for oboe and piano and Spike Protein for twelve oboes. She enjoys arranging music she loves—by dead white men and by people who are not dead white men—to expand what the oboe gets to say. She also writes widely about classical music and its power structures, and maintains a blog and newsletter of some notoriety. The New York Times once described her as a “small, intense woman,” which seems accurate enough.
William Wen:
William Wen, young Chinese-American pianist from Brooklyn, has studied at the Brooklyn College Preparatory and is now a pupil of Sara Davis Buechner at the Greenwich House School of Music. William has given numerous solo and chamber music performances in the New York area, and will soon graduate from Brooklyn Technical High School. When he is not practicing the piano, William can be found in research labs investigating organic chemistry and the pharmaceutical sciences
