West Meets East

"Chosen by the clarinet", Transylvanian born Hungarian American clarinetist, Monika Woods was noted for her "tender and insightful playing" and "exquisite musicianship" in a review in Cape Cod Times by Keith Powers which also stated "her soft passages sounded like whispers, and when she played with force, it was with complete confidence".

But how did this performer, teacher come to be?

It's seems unlikely that a girl (now a First Place winner of the Cape Cod Symphony's Soloist Competition) from the secluded crevices of the land-locked mountains of Transylvania (a Hungarian enclave within present-day Romania) would find her niche as a US citizen amidst the salty air of the Cape, but it happened.

Perhaps it's because the wind blowing through the marsh grass of Paine's Creek so clearly echoes the gentle fields of the Transylvanian plains.

As a natural gesturalist and born educator, the strains of Béla Bartók caught…