SPECIAL GUESTS

Terrance McKnight serves humanity and music by “bringing everyone’s culture to the table, by not putting one above the other, but rather by ensuring a big enough table with a place for all.”

Terrance is the author of the upcoming book “Concert Black,” anticipating a 2024 release by Abrams Press. McKnight is the weekday evening host for WQXR, New York’s only all-classical music station. In early 2023 in association with the station, his production company, Concert Black LLC, launched a podcast series. The first topic, representations of Blackness in opera, was captured in 16 weekly episodes and distilled into 4-one hour radio documentaries.

Prior audio documentaries he has authored, voiced and produced for WQXR feature Langston Hughes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hazel Scott, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Florence Beatrice Price, Leonard Bernstein and Harry Belafonte. Another of his radio shows for WQXR, All Ears with Terrance McKnight, a series about musical discovery, was honored with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award.

In June 2023, Terrance, Ron Carter, Clive Davis and the Reverend Al Sharpton were speakers at a New York City-based celebration of Harry Belafonte. Also in 2022-23, he hosted diverse offerings in music from the Han and Heung Festival exploring the stories and traditions of Korea at Louisiana State University, to the New York premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera “Hometown to the World” at historic Town Hall, to facilitating a conversation around the Black Lives Matter movement and the creation of the first community-based mural in the Brooklyn neighborhood during the summer of 2020 in Bedford-Stuyvesant and lent his voice as narrator for performances of Peter & the Wolf.

In his latest creative offering, Langston & Beethoven: Black & Proud, McKnight gives voice to the poetry of Hughes paired with chamber music works of Beethoven, Gershwin and others, combined with storytelling, narrating vignettes from his childhood and current events. The show was a February 2023 presentation at Lincoln Center’s Sidewalk Studio.

Terrance has hosted concerts for Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, the American Pianists Association Competition, gave the keynote address for the diversity track of the 2022 Music Teachers National Association conference and participated in journalism symposium for the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, also in 2022. His is the voice of recent media campaigns for Carnegie Hall and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In association with the exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective at Museum of Modern Arts, Terrance curated a series of concerts and audio tours in 2019.

McKnight is a member of the Artistic Council, with Claire Chase and conductor Robert Spano, for The Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida, serves on the board of MacDowell and is the Artistic Advisor for the Harlem Chamber Players. He has participated on panels for Chamber Music America, the Mellon Foundation, American Opera Projects, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, ASCAP and the New York State Council on the Arts. It is Terrance McKnight’s commentary that introduces the liner notes for the recent recording of Three Ife Songs by Phillip Glass, featuring singer Angelique Kidjo, Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.

CHRISTOPHER REUNING, violin maker, restorer, and expert, grew up in a musical family and began playing cello at age 7. He became a violin-making apprentice at the age of 12 at the House of Primavera in Philadelphia.

During the next six years, he frequently traveled to Cremona, Italy, to work with Virgilio Capellini and Alfredo Primavera, which complemented his Philadelphia training. Chris developed a keen interest in the study and identification of old violins and was mentored by Dario D’Attili. Chris also counts Charles Beare and the late Robert Bein as important influences in this field.

Chris has served on the boards of the Violin Society of America and the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers and is a member of the Entente Internationale des Luthiers et Archetiers. As past president of the AFVBM, he organized the annual meeting and exhibit in Seattle that examined the Cremonese violins made between 1730 and 1750. He has also organized AFVBM exhibitions that examined both the Venetian, and Neapolitan schools, and the followers of the Amati family.