By Mary Lou Basaraba
The Grace Church Performing Arts Ministry invites the public to the next event in the community outreach MidDAY At Grace music series presenting the brilliant young musician, Dominik Yoder on Friday, Oct.16 at Noon. The concert is FREE and donations benefit the Grace Diner, the largest food sharing program on the West Side.
MidDAY At Grace concerts are presented at Grace Lutheran Church, 4427 Overland Ave in Culver City.
Concert pianist Dominik Yoder, born and raised in Los Angeles is the Senior Winner of the 2025/26 Culver City Symphony Orchestra Parness Concerto Competition and will appear with the Orchestra on April 18, 2027 as the featured soloist playing the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in an afternoon concert at the Frost Auditorium.
From an early age, Dominik displayed an extraordinary passion and determination for music learning the piano on his own initiative at the age of two and since then, his performances have been described as “authoritative and lyrical with a powerful technique seasoned by a playful sense of humor.”
Dominik has won first prize in more than a dozen local, regional, and state competitions, most recently in the Beverly Hills National Audition and New York Concert Guild Competition; and as a top winner in the International Fujairah International Piano Competition and Chopin Competition in Hartford. He won the second prize in the 2024 Liszt International Competition in Los Angeles and in 2022, Dominik received the Outstanding Pole Award from the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles. In 2018 he was the Grand Prize winner in the Redlands Bowl Young Artists Concerto Competition and the Gold Medal winner in the Kosciuszko Foundation Young Pianists Competition in Washington, D.C.
He has performed solo recitals in Poland including in ?elazowa Wola (the birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin), as well as in Puerto Rico, Germany, and across the United States. In Los Angeles he has appeared with the Culver City and Brentwood Symphony Orchestras; the Southwest Youth Chamber Music Festival Orchestra, and the Hollywood Orchestra at the Redlands Bowl.
Dominik has been presented on Polish television and radio, and participated in master classes with leading international coaches including Edward Wolanin, under whose guidance he continues to hone his skills. He continues to study with Ró?a Kostrzewska Yoder, his primary teacher since the beginning of his artistic journey.
From Dominik: “I enjoy playing classical music which can express what words cannot, and perhaps in a world as divided as ours, art forms like this can bring us together and I’m excited to play two major works by Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in the MidDAY concert at Grace Church. Beethoven grew up within older traditions but created a completely new style of music as heard in his “Waldstein” Sonata, written during his middle period when he began to boldly experiment. The Sonata opens with a C major chord repeated 14 times—something that had never been done before and making it overwhelmingly positive.
The Beethoven contrasts sharply with the Études-Tableaux, Op. 39 by Sergei Rachmaninoff consisting of nine challenging solos each in a minor key, with some sounding dark and gloomy and others more fiery and energetic
including no. 6 in A minor nicknamed ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
In this Opus, his last written in Russia before fleeing World War I to the United States, you can hear elements of weeping, chaos, and intensity throughout but, the final etude concludes in a hopeful Major key—perhaps inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s use of the Picardy third.
I hope you can join me for the performance on Friday, Oct. 16!”
Donations are gratefully received at the Door or Online at https://gracediner.org