VISITING MUSIC ANGELS

OUR DIRECTOR: KATHRYN MIENTKA FARRUGGIA, concert pianist

The vision of Visiting Music Angels came to Kathryn in the spring of 2024, when she was grieving the death of her third husband, Charles Farruggia. Having now buried three husbands in eleven years, she found her only solace in music. Recognizing the incomparable healing power of music, she desired to bring this comfort to others. Her own parents had been house bound due to illness for five years, and took great comfort when Kathryn visited them – she always brought her keyboard and played many hours of music for them.

It was there, playing for her lonely, house-bound parents, while grieving the loss of her third husband, that the idea of Visiting Music Angels was born.

Kathryn Mientka Farruggia has been very musically active on the Western Slope since 1995, when she and her first husband, cellist Tyme Mientka, moved with their three children to Grand Junction. They had previously spent eight years in Germany, touring both Europe and the USA as the acclaimed cello-piano Mientka Duo. Here in Colorado, Kathryn and Tyme founded and directed the Western Slope Concert Series, and the cross-over Celtic band FEAST. Both as a cello-piano duo and in the Celtic band FEAST they were featured on hour-long PBS documentaries.

Tyme passed away from cancer in 2012, and in 2017 Kathryn married Stan Stanfill, a man who was instrumental in helping her with her dream of acquiring a hand-made piano keyboard crafted for small hands. One of her crusades is promoting this keyboard, called the DS 5.5 narrow-keys keyboard. She is part of a world-wide movement to get this size piano keyboard into every concert hall and every university. It is a tremendous help for women pianists with small hands.

Stan passed away in 2017, and in 2019 Kathryn married brilliant singer and actor Charles Farruggia. They moved initially to Arizona, then South Dakota. Together they created the original drama-concert “Home Sweet Home,” based on memoirs of soldiers from the Civil War and written by Charles. The show won the South Dakota Touring Artists Grant in 2022, and they toured the show to five states over the course of three years. Kathryn and Charles relocated from the Black Hills to the beautiful Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, and in 2022, and opened a music and supper club. They performed every weekend from December 2022 until August 2023.

After Charles passed unexpectedly in December of 2023, Kathryn lived for a year on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (Charles was a tribal member, Lakota) and taught piano lessons at the Red Cloud Indian School. In 2024, after the school lost funding for music programs, she relocated to Grand Junction and is on the faculty of the CMU music school, teaching piano and music theory, and resuming her post as artistic director of the Western Slope Concert Series, a 501c-3 nonprofit, now in its 27th season. She is tremendously excited about the nonprofit’s new project, “Visiting Music Angels.”