Our Founding Members
The Mel Bonis Project is comprised of a wide variety of individuals who are interested in discovering, disseminating, promoting, performing, and teaching the music of 19th-century French women composers. Here are our founding musicians. To become a member, we invite you to join our mailing list and take the MBP Challenge!
Giovanna Confalone
Giovanna Confalone is a professional pianist, vocal coach, voice pedagogue, and collaborative pianist whose
career spans more than three decades. A summa cum laude graduate of Boston University's College of Fine
Arts, Giovanna earned her bachelor's degree in collaborative piano performance in 1998, with an emphasis
on vocal duo coaching and art song repertoire. A Boston native, Giovanna returned to Massachusetts in 2010
to pursue her Master's of Music Education degree at her alma mater.
Giovanna has been a faculty member of Cambridge Music and Riverside Theatre Works School of
Performing Arts in Boston, where she was appointed principal Music Director and taught piano and voice
until 2005. She joined the faculty at Steinert's Piano Academy in 2010 before dedicating herself exclusively to
her private studio, which she has been cultivating since 1996.
Over the course of her career, Giovanna has accompanied recitals given by members of the Metropolitan Opera, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, Boston Lyric Opera, and the North German Radio Chorus (NDR) in Hamburg. She was also a founding member and music director of Boston's swing vocal ensemble, The Sophisticated Ladies.
An avid would-be linguist, Giovanna has studied French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Latin, and
Greek. Her knowledge of languages, combined with her extensive background in art song and vocal
repertoire, has made her a sought-after vocal coach for professional opera singers.
Giovanna's current work includes the creation of the Mel Bonis Project, a music collaborative devoted to discovering, disseminating, promoting, performing and teaching the music of 19th-century French women composers. The project brings together her longstanding interests in vocal repertoire, language, historical research, collaborative performance, and the recovery of music by composers whose work has too often been overlooked.
Photo by Robert Torres
Velléda Miragias
Velléda Miragias enjoys a multifaceted career as an orchestral and chamber musician, educator, and collaborative artist. A Boston-based French-American cellist acclaimed for her “impeccable technical mastery [and] strong expression” (Le Confolentais), Miragias currently serves as Associate Principal Cello with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Assistant Principal Cello with the Cape Symphony, and performs regularly with many of New England’s leading orchestral and period ensembles.
Trained in France and the United States, she attended the Conservatoire National de Boulogne and the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris rue de Madrid, and later continued her studies at Indiana University, earning the prestigious Performer Diploma as a student of Iseut Chuat and János Starker, and at Boston University, where she received her Master of Music.
Miragias is the recipient of France’s Ministry of Culture Award and a first-prize winner of the Prix de la ville d’Épernay. Early in her career, she appearedat the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Festival de violoncelle de Beauvais— performing alongside Renaud Capuçon, János Starker, and Jian Wang —and participated in master classes with Isaac Stern, Natalia Gutman, and Anner Bylsma.
With chamber music residing at the heart of her artistic identity, Miragias regularly collaborates with a wide range of artists and ensembles. She has recently recorded the complete flute trios of Joseph Haydn for Arabesque Records, and premiered Meira Warshauer’s Coquelicot for flute and cello, commissioned by the Boston Public Library for Miragias and flutist Carol Wincenc.
Deeply committed to teaching and mentorship, she serves on the faculty of Phillips Exeter Academy and the Rivers School Conservatory and teaches at the International Academy of Music in Italy's Tuscany region, where she coaches chamber music in an immersive festival setting.