43rd Benefit Concert

Our benefit concert 2018 was a blast! Kudos to Marcia Eckert for organizing such a wonderful event.

We were fortunate to have Blue Door playing the whimsical Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano as well as a movement from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote this piece while a prisoner of war in German captivity and it was first performed by his fellow prisoners. It has come to be recognized as one of his most important works.

Joseph Rutkowski presented the solo clarinet movement from the same piece. The Eckert/Gilwood duo performed the lyrical Schubert Rondo in A Major for piano four-hands. Vivacious and charismatic mezzo-soprano Janice Meyerson, no stranger to Group 11 concerts, sang Mahler’s haunting Songs of a Wayfarer. Robert Muczynski’s jaunty and jazzy Fantasy Trio for clarinet, cello and piano rounded out the concert.

2019 Annual Dinner

To celebrate another year of human rights advocacy, Group 11 held its annual get together dinner at Pearl’s Chinese Restaurant on January 7, 2019. Following the group’s longstanding tradition, its co-coordinator Sue asked the attendants to guess the number or letters that the group had collected during the Amnesty’s Write for Rights letter writing marathon in the end of 2018. Steve Abrams came closest to guessing total number of letters we collected. The lucky winner of the contests received a book and a calendar from Sue.

You probably wonder what is the exact amount of letters our group collected during W4R’18 campaign. No more teasing: we collected 692 W4R letters in 2018. Thanks everyone who contributed to help us reach this impressive number!

Steve, who came closest to guessing the amount of W4R letters the Group 11 collected in 2018, receives his gifts from Sue.