Ellen Strba Scholl and her younger brother Dan Strba started playing together years ago while growing up
in Chicago.
Both started playing piano under the guidance of their mother, a public school music teacher.
Scholl gravitated more to singing while Strba, who started piano at 4, stayed with piano, then added
guitar and was active in his high school swing choir.
Scholl, of Bowling Green, remembers them playing musical theater songs together. “We were goofing around
… We loved to sing together.”
‘We would entertain at family parties,” Strba recalls.
But school and professional lives took them in different directions.
For his part, Strba heard his high school orchestra director play the viola. “It just spoke to me and I
knew that was the instrument I wanted to play,” he said.
Despite a late start, he flourished on the instrument, and after college spent four years playing in the
U.S. Army’s White House Chamber Orchestra. Now he’s violist with the Houston (Texas) Symphony.
His sister pursued a career as an opera singer and now teaches at Bowling Green State University part
time.
Both ended up marrying musicians. Scholl married Christopher Scholl, an operatic tenor who now directs
opera activities at BGSU.
Strba married Marcia Sterling, a professional violinist who runs her own company. Her projects include
The Best Little Klezmer Band in Texas, in which Strba also sings and plays keyboards.
Last year the two couples decided to merge talents on a recital while the Scholls were visiting Houston.
Music for mezzo-soprano, tenor, violin and viola is not common, so they approached Houston-based composer
Mary Caroll Warwick. She provided “In Costa Rica,” a setting of a poem by Ilsa Gilbert, for those four
instruments with piano.
That piece will be the featured work on a recital they will give Thursday at 8 p.m. in Bryan Recital Hall
in the Moore Musical Arts Center on the BGSU campus.
Before last year, the last time Ellen Strba Scholl and Strba played together was at her junior recital
when she was an undergraduate. Still getting the two couples together to make music was a natural fit.
“It’s very easy for us to perform together,” Strba said. “We can read each other very well. Things fall
together well … I enjoy hearing her singing.”
“We just play and have fun,” Scholl said.
Strba and Scholl will also perform trios for viola, mezzo-soprano and piano by Hermann Reutter and Adolph
Busch.
Christopher Scholl will perform Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “On Wenlock Edge” with a string quartet and piano.
Assisting on the program will be pianist Kevin Bylsma and violinists Vasile Beluska and Penny Thompson
Kruse and cellist Alan Smith will join Strba in the string quartet,
