Category: Festival Artists Parent Category

Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.

Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate relationships between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a short experimental film for Cello and Trash, pairs Kleijn’s cello with large amounts of mylar, plastic bottles and soda cans. An ongoing collaboration with Aliya Ultan, the film received its premiere at NYC’s Roulette Intermedium April 2023. Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”

Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, calling upon them to collectively negotiate a way forward. Inspired by Civil War–era drum commands, her composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), performed by Ensemble Dal Niente at Big Ears Festival, tasks two spatially separated ensembles with reacting to one another based on each other’s rhythms. Alternately, Kleijn’s silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) explores touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.

An active musician in classical and contemporary classical spheres, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented her solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. As an improviser, she has collaborated with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Macie Stewart, Joe McPhee, Claire Rousay, Caroline Davis, Damon Locks, and Du Yun.

Kleijn is a Drag City recording artist, releasing STIR with Bill MacKay (2019), Momentum 5: Stammer (triptych) with Ken Vandermark (2021), An Ayler Xmas with Mars Williams (2017),  and SINE NOMINE with Mark Feldman (2022).

Visit Katinka Kleijn’s Website

Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” the GRAMMY®-nominated JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025, embarking on their third decade as a pioneering string quartet synchronized in their mission to create an international community through transformative, mind-broadening experiences and close listening. Founded in 2005, the ensemble operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music, delving deeply into challenging new compositions and musical practices outside the classical mainstream. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for three GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

Among the highlights of the 2024-2025 season, JACK Quartet officially marks their 20th anniversary with a celebratory concert at 92NY in New York City, featuring the world premiere of a new JACK-commissioned work by Anthony Cheung; the U.S. premiere of JACK commission Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons at Lincoln Center; and the world premiere of Ellen Fullman’s Energy Archive at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 in Pittsburgh. In addition, JACK Quartet celebrates their long association with composer John Zorn with the release of Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, as well as an album release concert at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium.

International engagements include JACK Quartet’s annual marathon of performances at Wigmore Hall in the UK and appearances at Pierre Boulez Saal and Konzerthaus Berlin in Germany, along with appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland. The season also brings the European premiere of Natacha Diels’ Beautiful Trouble at Konzerthaus Berlin.

The JACK Quartet embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform with, yielding a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. Through their successful nonprofit model, JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. The world’s top composers choose JACK because of their singular dedication to innovation and experimentation.

According to Musical America, “many of their recordings are must-haves, for anyone interested in new music.” They have been nominated for multiple GRAMMY® Awards, the most recent being their albums of music by John Luther Adams—both were nominated in the 2022 and 2023 Best Ensemble Performance category. Other albums feature music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Nick Dunston, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and upcoming releases of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.

Having long observed how the social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional access disproportionately and unfairly exclude many people, JACK Studio offers composers paid opportunities to develop new work, hear their music performed by JACK Quartet, consult with mentors in the field, and receive recorded documentation. JACK Studio receives hundreds of applications each season and selects up to 15 composers or artists for two distinct opportunities: Two-Year Residencies, offering a longer-term relationship with JACK Quartet, and Reading Sessions, in which recipients have existing works for string quartet read by JACK Quartet.

More than 40 composers have worked with JACK Quartet through JACK Studio thus far, hailing from Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa, Syria, and the United States. Their projects have been performed by JACK Quartet at venues including TIME:SPANS, Central Park, the Lucerne Festival, MoMA PS1, and Mannes School of Music, in addition to being recorded for professional releases. Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.

JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), The Louvre (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina). Among their honors, they have earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize, been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year, and received Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.

JACK Quartet makes their home in New York City, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School and provides mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring.

Visit JACK Quartet’s Website

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such musika katatubo from the North and South Philippine islands; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.

She is a recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Award in Music/ Sound (2022), a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and a TED Senior Fellowship (2014). 

Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.

Her album, Talking Gong ( New Focus Recordings 2021), features soloists and ensemble members Claire Chase ( bass, alto , flute and piccolo) and Alex Peh ( piano) , with its title piece commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and by birdsongs of the region.

Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021) and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).

Ibarra’s piece Fragility Etudes, was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. These compositions are rhythmic studies for solos and ensemble which reflects humanity’s interdependence.  Ibarra explores conduction, polyrhythms and concepts from the physics of glass.  Fragility Etudes was filmed in residency and premiered at MASSMoCA in live performance 2021. The film is directed by collaborating multimedia artist Yuka C. Honda. September 2022 Ibarra conducted multi-ensemble Fragility Etudes in Zamane Festival Morocco. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion Susie Ibarra, for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video which premiered in June 2021.

As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).

Visit Susie Ibarra’s Website

Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.

Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.

His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.

He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.

Visit Marcos Balter’s Website

Xuan, new media artist, is also a filmmaker and pianist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and technology.

A trained classical pianist, she actively develops innovative, cross-disciplinary projects that broaden the immersive scope of new music and performance through the lens of “visual music.” Her work encompasses experimental animation, abstract scenography, music videos, interactive installations and large-scale projection mapping. Her music-driven films explore themes of femininity, power, inner conflict, and multicultural identity.

She has collaborated with artists such as Glenn Kotche, Pierre Jodlowski, Ben Wendel, Nina Shekhar, Annika Socolofsky, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Anzû Quartet, Akropolis Quintet, Nois Quartet, Parhelion Trio, Rubiks Collective, and Ensemble Garage — which have led to live performances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MCA Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum, University of South Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill, CU Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University, SF Jazz, Le Poisson Rouge, Ad Astra Music Festival, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and CAP UCLA’S Tune In Festival. Xuan was selected to create projections for Art on the MART (2021), “the largest permanent digital art projection in the world” on the on the 2.5-acre façade of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, in collaboration with Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird and Michael Gordon.

Her interactive installations have been exhibited at the ErsterErster Gallery in Berlin; the ibug Urban Art Festival in Reinchenbach; and Design Biennale 2019 in Zürich; the RESCUE Residency in Santo Stefano di Magra, Italy; Sound Forms 2021 in Hong Kong; and at the Rail Yards in Albuquerque, as part of Onebeat’s 10th anniversary celebration in 2022. She was invited to be an artist-in-residence at the Digital Graffiti Festival at Alys Beach in 2023 and the ATLAS B2 Residency in 2024.

Visit Xuan’s Website

José Maria Blumenschein, a native of Freiburg (Germany) born of Brazilian parents, currently serves as 1st Concertmaster of the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne after serving as Associate Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three seasons. During his tenure with WDR he also took two Seasons off to perform as first Concertmaster of the Vienna State Opera and Philharmonic.

As a passionate leader he regularly performs with many Orchestras and Ensembles such as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, London Symphony Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Dresden Staatskapelle, NDR Radio Orchestra and many more.

Blumenschein is also a founding member of ‘Kammermusik Köln’, a chamber music series in Cologne founded by members of WDR Radio, Gürzenich Orchestra, and Cologne Conservatory members to be the first all year chamber music series.

Born in 1985, Blumenschein received his first violin lesson at the age of four in Freiburg, Germany, at the “Pflüger Institute for Highly Gifted Children”. In 1990 he began studies with Vera Kramarowa in Mannheim. In 2001 Blumenschein was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with conductor and violinist Joseph Silverstein and served as Concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra.

Blumenschein has been performing with the Mahler Orchestra for almost two decades. Since 2023, he has shared the MCO’s concertmaster position with Matthew Truscott.

Vicente Alberola is the Artistic Director of Music Masters Course Valencia (MMCV), principal clarinetist of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and solo clarinetist of Les Dissonances and the Utopia Orchestra.

Alberola studied with Walter Boeykens at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, Belgium. At the same time, he took lessons with George Pieterson (of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) and Larry Combs (of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). For more than 20 years, Alberola was principal clarinetist of the opera orchestras in Madrid and Galicia. During the last decade, he has been a guest principal clarinetist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the MMCK Tokyo Orchestra. He has played under the baton of Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Muti, Daniele Gatti, Daniel Harding, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Nicola Luisotti, among others.

In 2003, he was appointed conductor of the Madrid Opera Youth Orchestra, and in 2007, conductor of the Soria Youth Orchestra. He was the chief conductor of the Orquesta 430 of Vigo. He has conducted the Oviedo Filarmonía, the Orquesta de Castilla y León, the Madrid Symphony, the Real Filarmonía Santiago, the Orquesta del Valles, the Valencia Symphony, the National Youth Orchestra of Spain, the Youth Orchestra of the Canary Islands, and the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Galicia. Alberola has also conducted the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Beijing Festival and the Musikfest Hamburg.  Recently, he has been invited by the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia and the MMCJ Tokyo.

In the field of chamber music, he is a regular guest at the Beethoven Festival Bonn, the Alélla Festival, and the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris. 

Claire Chase, described by The New York Times recently as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season and serves as the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.

Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia. Upcoming concerto projects include the world premiere of a new duo concerto by Dai Fujikura for Chase and the violinist Patricia Kopachinskaja, which the pair will premiere with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, with subsequent performances with Ensemble Resonanz at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and on tour in Switzerland, Belgium, Turkey, and Greece. In the 2022-23 season, Chase premiered a new duo concerto by Felipe Lara with the vocalist and bassist esperanza spalding and the conductor Susanna Mälkki, which was named one of the Best Classical Music Performances of the Year by The New York Times.

In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, described by The New Yorker as “a quarter-century journey with little precedent.” Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, educational initiatives, and a community-focused approach to cultural production. In 2023, Chase performed all ten Density programs to date in a weeklong series of events co-produced by Carnegie Hall and The Kitchen.. Central to the Densityproject is a commitment to supporting an international, multigenerational community of flutists who will take the Density repertoire in bold new interpretive directions. The Density Fellowsprogram, launched in 2023 in celebration of the 10th anniversary, provides an international cohort of emerging flutists with the resources to make the Density repertoire their own. Chase is the artistic director of Density Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute in the 21st century.

As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017 and as an ensemble member on performance and educational projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that resulted in the premieres of over 1,000 new works and earned the group multiple Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and the Ensemble of the Year Award from Musical America Worldwide.

A deeply committed educator, Chase is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural advocacy. Chase is also Creative Associate at The Juilliard School, where she mentors young artists and engages students in a range of interdisciplinary projects. With her longtime colleague Steven Schick, she cofounded Ensemble Evolution at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, a three-week intensive for the next generation of interdisciplinary artists, curators, and teachers. Chase’s Debs Creative Chair residency at Carnegie Hall encompassed programming for all ages, including a “Day of Listening” for children and families inspired by the listening philosophies of Pauline Oliveros. Chase will partner with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to expand her Pauline Oliveros project as part of the PST ART x Science Collide festival in 2024-25.

Claire Chase’s extensive discography includes eight solo albums of world premiere recordings and dozens of collaborative recordings with ensembles, composers, and sound artists from a wide range of musical genres. Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of  becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn with her partner, the author Kirstin Valdez Quade, and their two-year-old daughter.

Visit Claire Chase’s Website

Rick Stotijn studied double bass at the Conservatory in Amsterdam with his father Peter Stotijn and graduated with the highest distinction. He continued his studies with Bozo Paradzik at the Hochschule in Freiburg. He won several first prizes at competitions and was awarded the highest accolade for a musician in the Netherlands, the Dutch Music Prize. According to the jury, “Rick is a versatile musician with moving musicality and overwhelming virtuosity.”

Among the many solo appearances that followed worldwide was a Carte Blanche series in the Recital Hall of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Stotijn performs regularly as a soloist with orchestras such as the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, South Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Toulon Opera Symphony Orchestra, Musica Vitae Sweden, and Joensuu Symphony Orchestra. He was principal double bassist in the Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchester Berlin (RSO) and Amsterdam Sinfonietta and is currently principal in the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

As guest principal, he plays regularly in the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Orchestra Mozart. He is also a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. In chamber music, he has worked with Janine Jansen, Christianne Stotijn, Liza Ferschtman, Julius Drake, Cecilia Bernardini, Vilde Frang, Julian Rachlin, Lawrence Power, Tabea Zimmermann, Lars Vogt, Christian Tetzlaff, and many others.

Stotijn is a regular guest at festivals such as the Lucerne Festival, Delft Chambe Music Festival, and the International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht. Stotijn is a Professor for Double Bass at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf. He performs on a Raffaele & Antonio Gagliano double bass, generously loaned by the National Musical Instrument Foundation.

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Julie Smith Phillips, principal harpist of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, is one of the most prominent American harpists today, performing as both an orchestral musician and concert artist. She is a two-time medalist in the USA International Harp Competition having received the silver medal in 2004 and bronze in 2001. She made her National Symphony Orchestra debut in 2003 and has been honored in numerous other competitions throughout the country.

A recitalist and soloist with orchestra, Phillips’s appearances include multiple solo performances with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, the South Dakota Symphony, the West Los Angeles Symphony, the Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, the National Repertory Orchestra, and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, among others. She has been a featured soloist for American Harp Society National Conferences, the USA International Harp Competition, Lyon & Healy’s 150th Birthday Celebration & Harptacular Concert series, the International Harp Festival, Harp Oklahoma Workshop, and has served as a guest artist at the Young Artist Harp Seminar.

Equally experienced as a chamber and orchestral musician, Phillips collaborates with renowned musicians across the country. A founding member of The Myriad Trio, she regularly appears in chamber concerts across the country and has performed abroad as well. Her chamber and orchestral festival credits include the Piedmont & Kingston Chamber Music Festivals, Breckenridge Music Festival, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, Mozaic Festival, Sun Valley Summer Symphony, Tanglewood Music Festival, and numerous others.

Prior to her post in San Diego, she served as acting principal harpist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (2006–07) and principal harpist for the New World Symphony (2004–06). Phillips is an avid promoter and performer of new music. Numerous pieces have been written for and premiered by Phillips including Tree Suite for Harp by Hannah Lash; Cactus, a double concerto for harp and violin by Michael Torke; The Eye of Night by David Bruce; Variations on a Simple Theme by Avner Dorman; Petal by Petal Lei Liang; andSonata by Jeremy Cavaterra. She is also a recipient of the Mario Falcao Prize for Best Performance of Mischa Zupko’s Despedida (contemporary music selection at the
2004 USA International Harp Competition). Formerly head of the Harp Department at Arizona State University (2013–17), Phillips is the founder and director of the Nebraska Harp Workshop and maintains a private studio out of her home working with harpists on skills and career guidance. She is a certified instructor in the Suzuki harp method and is president of the San Diego Harp Society. She has recorded two albums: The Rhapsodic Harp and The Eye of Night. Phillips received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in harp performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Yolanda Kondonassis. Julie Smith Phillips is a native of Hastings, NE, and now resides in San Diego with her husband and three children.

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Aliisa Neige Barrière is a French-Finnish conductor with a broad repertoire ranging from early to contemporary music, who puts special emphasis on carefully curated programs around engaging dramaturgies and bringing previously silenced voices to the forefront. Her passion for making new voices heard has also led her to actively commission new works. In her still young career, Barrière has already collaborated with numerous orchestras and ensembles including Sinfonia Lahti, Avanti!, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Oulu Sinfonia, Tampere Philharmonic, BIT20 and the Swedish Radio Orchestra, to name a few.

In 2023, Barrière graduated from the Sibelius Academy orchestral conducting class, where she studied under the tutelage of Sakari Oramo. Previously, she was a student of Jorma Panula at the Panula Academy. She has since regularly worked as an assistant to conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki, Sakari Oramo and Pekka Kuusisto.

In 2021-2023 she served as the assistant conductor to Dalia Stasevska with Sinfonia Lahti and held the position of Young Conductor in Residence with the Århus Sinfonietta. In 2023, she was awarded the Young Artist Award at the Mikkeli Festival.

Originally a violinist, Barrière honed her leadership skills as a guest concertmaster or section leader in ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Secession Orchestra, Barokksolistene and the Oslo Sinfonietta. Her violin studies took her from Paris, as a student of Suzanne Gessner and Richard Schmoucler, to New York, where she studied with Renee Jolles, Laurie Smukler and Lewis Kaplan. She then moved to Oslo where she finished her studies as a student of Peter Herresthal and Isabelle van Keulen.

She also studied baroque violin under Nancy Wilson in New York and Bjarte Eike and Catherine Martin in Oslo.

In the 2023–2024 season, Barrière will make her debut at the Ojai Festival, leading the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and make her return to the Mikkeli Festival with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She will also be the Artist-in-Residence of the Turku Music Festival, curating a series of concerts ranging from chamber music to orchestral music around the concept of uchrony or alternate history.

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Sae Hashimoto (sa-eh ha-shee-moh-toh) is a Japanese-born percussionist. Her wide range of expertise and ever-growing musical curiosity have contributed to her multifaceted career that continues to evolve. Her virtuosity and unwavering commitment make her a sought-after performer in classical, baroque, contemporary and experimental music.

Hashimoto is passionate about performing music by living composers. As a member of piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, as well as Talea Ensemble, she has worked closely with today’s leading voices in contemporary and experimental music including Tyshawn Sorey, Michael Gordon, Øyvind Torvund, Agata Zubel, and Annea Lockwood. A long time collaboration with John Zorn has resulted in premiering over a dozen of his works for the vibraphone, which are recorded on two albums on the Tzadik label. 

As an orchestral musician Hashimoto has performed with the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, New Jersey Symphony, and the American Composers Orchestra. She also performs baroque music on her 19th century period timpani with ensembles like TENET Vocal Artists and Clarion Music Society.

Her original music can be heard on a self-titled album by Archipelago X, an improv-based trio consisting of Brian Marsella on keyboards and 2022 MacArthur Fellow Ikue Mori on electronics. Hashimoto and Brian are currently working on a new project for the vibraphone and piano, with a new album set to be released in 2025. 

Her love for percussion originated by chance in her 5th grade music class in Osaka, Japan, when she won her first drum set part in an epic game of rock-paper-scissors. She moved to New York City in 2012 to attend the Juilliard School, where she studied with Daniel Druckman and Markus Rhoten, with comprehensive scholarship support from the Kovner Fellowship.

Upon completing her Masters in 2018, she was selected as the percussion fellow for Ensemble Connect, a prestigious program of Carnegie Hall that combines musical excellence with education, advocacy and entrepreneurship.

She currently resides in West Orange, NJ.

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Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ljubinka Kulisic received her Bachelor’s and Master of Arts in Music Performance from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland in Lugano. After graduating in Switzerland, she moved to Canada for the Doctor of Musical Arts program at the University of Toronto, where she also worked as a teaching assistant for the Contemporary Music Ensemble. In 2017 she participated in Google Talks in San Francisco where she presented music for accordion to Google engineers. Kulisic participated in numerous concerts across Europe and North America. She has performed as a soloist with the New World Symphony in Miami and at the New England Conservatory in Boston as a member of the organization “Music for Food,” collaborated with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and violist Kim Kashkashian.

In addition to music, she is known in her country of birth for her political engagement. As a reward for her activism, in 2017 she was awarded the “Super Woman” award in her hometown, from which she had to escape with her parents as a one-year-old girl due to civil war.

She speaks four languages: Serbian, English, German, and Italian.

Jay Campbell is a cellist actively exploring a wide range of creative music. He has been recognized for approaching both old and new music with the same curiosity and commitment, and his performances have been called “electrifying” by the New York Times and “gentle, poignant, and deeply moving” by the Washington Post.

The only musician ever to receive two Avery Fisher Career Grants — in 2016 as a soloist, and again in 2019 as a member of the JACK Quartet — Campbell made his concerto debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and in 2016, he worked with Alan Gilbert as the artistic director for Ligeti Forward, part of the New York Philharmonic Biennale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017, he was Artist-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival along with frequent collaborator violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, where he gave the premiere of Luca Francesconi’s cello concerto Das Ding Singt. In 2018 he appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has recorded the concertos of George Perle and Marc-Andre Dalbavie with the Seattle Symphony, and in 2023/2024 will premiere a new concerto, Reverdecer, by Andreia Pinto-Correia with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Portugal, and in Brazil with the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo. In 2022 he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as curator and cellist for his second Green Umbrella concert, premiering two concertos by Wadada Leo Smith and inti figgis-vizueta. 

Campbell’s primary artistic interest is the collaboration with living creative musicians and has worked in this capacity with Catherine Lamb, John Luther Adams, Marcos Balter, Tyshawn Sorey, and many others. His close association with John Zorn resulted in two discs of new works for cello, Hen to Pan (2015) and Azoth (2020). Deeply committed as a chamber musician, he is the cellist of the JACK Quartet as well as the Junction Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao, and multidisciplinary collective AMOC.

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Noted for her “dazzling, virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe), Lucy Fitz Gibbon is a dynamic musician whose repertoire spans the Renaissance to the present. She believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the multiplicity and diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. As such, Ms. Fitz Gibbon has given modern premieres of rediscovered works by Baroque composers Francesco Sacrati, Barbara Strozzi, and Agostino Agazzari, as well by 20^th century composers including Tadeusz Kassern, Florence Price, and Jean Barraqué. She has also worked closely with numerous others, workshopping and premiering works by Kate Soper, Sheila Silver, Reena Esmail, Roberto Sierra, and Pauline Oliveros, to name just a few. In helping to realize the complexities of music beyond written notes, the experience of working with these composers translates to all music: the commitment to faithfully communicate not only the score, but also the underlying intentions of its creator.

In concert, Fitz Gibbon has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra; the Albany, Eureka, Lexington, Richmond, and Tulsa Symphonies; and the American Symphony Orchestra in her Carnegie Hall debut. In 2022-2023, she appears in concerts presented by Kneisel Hall, the Copland House, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Eureka Chamber Music Society, the Sacramento Chamber Music Society, Musicians from Marlboro, and Cornell, Bucknell, and Duke Universities. She will also cover the role of Laila in the premiere of Sheila Silver’s A Thousand Splendid Suns with Seattle Opera, and appear in Earl Kim’s Where Grief Slumbers at Boston’s Jordan Hall.

As a recitalist Ms. Fitz Gibbon has appeared with her husband and collaborative partner, pianist Ryan McCullough, in such venues as London’s Wigmore Hall; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, and Merkin Hall; Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center; and Toronto’s Koerner Hall. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they recorded performances at home and in concert halls to be broadcast around the world; their recent appearance on PBS’ Great Performances was praised by the Wall Street Journal as “breathtaking.” Their discography includes Descent/Return, featuring works by James Primosch and John Harbison (Albany Records, May 2020) and Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver alongside artists including Dawn Upshaw and Stephanie Blythe (Albany Records, February 2021). A forthcoming album, The Labor of Forgetting, includes the world premiere recording of Katherine Balch’s estrangement.

A graduate of Yale University, Ms. Fitz Gibbon also holds an artist diploma from The Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory and a master’s degree from Bard College-Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program; her principal teachers include Monica Whicher, Edith Bers, and Dawn Upshaw. She has spent summers at the Tanglewood Music Center (2014-2015) and Marlboro Music Festival (2016-2019, 2021-2022). She previously was Interim Director of Vocal Programs at Cornell University and now serves on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory’s Vocal Arts Programs. She also appeared as voice faculty and guest artist for the Kneisel Hall (2020-21) and SongFest (2022) summer festivals. 

Visit Lucy Fitz Gibbon’s Website

Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism”; the Philadelphia Inquirer praises its “seemingly infallible instincts for finding the center of gravity in every phrase and musical gesture”; and the Times (London) opines, “the Brentanos are a magnificent string quartet…This was wonderful, selfless music-making.” The Quartet has performed across five continents in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Tokyo’s Suntory hall; and the Sydney Opera House. Festival appearances include Aspen, the Ojai Music Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, and the Seoul Spring Festival of Chamber Music.

The Quartet has launched numerous projects that reimagine the standard concert program. In 2002, they celebrated their tenth anniversary by commissioning ten composers to write companion pieces for selections from Bach’s Art of Fugue, the result of which was an electrifying and wide-ranging single concert program. Fourteen years later, they revisited Bach’s masterpiece, performing the entire work in an ambitious multimedia project at the 92nd Street Y in New York with dancers, narrated excerpts, and an installation by artist Gabriel Calatrava. Recently, the Quartet presented a second multimedia project at the Y, which juxtaposed the poetry of Wallace Stevens with late Beethoven and music by composer Martin Bresnick. Other projects have included a three-program examination of Late Style, presented at Carnegie Hall; a program surveying the music of lamentation over the last 300 years crowned by Bartók’s Second Quartet; and numerous adaptations of music from Renaissance and early Baroque, including works by Josquin, Gesualdo, Purcell and Monteverdi.

The Quartet has been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, as well as pianists Jonathan Biss, Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet also maintains a strong commitment to new music, and has expanded the quartet canon by commissioning works from some of the most important composers of our time, among them Bruce Adolphe, Matthew Aucoin, Gabriela Frank, Stephen Hartke, Vijay Iyer, Steven Mackey, and Charles Wuorinen. Upcoming commissions and collaborations include a new quartet from Chinese composer Lei Liang; a viola quintet from James MacMillan; and a large-scale dramatic work, “Dido Reimagined,” based on the story of Dido and Aeneas, from composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, to be performed with soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Dedicated and highly sought after as educators, the Quartet are currently Artists-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music, where they perform in concert each semester, work closely with students in chamber music contexts, and spearhead the instruction at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in the summers. The Quartet has given numerous master classes and workshops across the country, and returns annually to the Taos School of Music as visiting faculty. In 2013 and 2017, the Quartet assisted at the Cliburn International Piano Competition, performing quintets with competitors in the final rounds. Before coming to Yale, the Quartet served for fifteen years as Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University.

The Quartet has recorded extensively, releasing discs of quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as a recording of the Schubert Cello Quintet with Michael Kannen. The Quartet has also recorded music by several contemporary composers, among them Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung, Steven Mackey and Charles Wuorinen. The Quartet’s recording of Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 131 was featured in the film “A Late Quartet,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken, released in 2012. In 2017, they recorded a live album with Joyce DiDonato, “Into the Fire—Live from Wigmore Hall,” which included works by Strauss, Debussy, Guillaume Lekeu and Jake Heggie for Warner Classics. Their most recent release features the K. 428 and K. 465 (“Dissonance”) Quartets of Mozart for the Azica label.

Awards and honors include the first Cleveland Quartet Award (1995); the Naumburg Chamber Music Award (1995); inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two at the CMS of Lincoln Center (1996); and the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut (at Wigmore Hall in 1997.)

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved”, the intended recipient of his famous love confession.

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Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras in the USA and abroad, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Kenney is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.

Following the 2021/22 season, which included solo appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, and l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Kenney devotes the first part of 2023 to the debut of his new project Shifting Ground, bringing it to the Celebrity Series of Boston, Cal Performances, Princeton University Concerts, and the Phillips Collection. Shifting Ground intersperses seminal works for solo violin by J.S. Bach with pieces of our time by Samuel Adams, Matthew Burtner, Steve Reich, Paul Wiancko, and Du Yun, as well as commissions by composers Salina Fisher and Angélica Negrón.

In recent years, Kenney has performed as soloist with the Detroit Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Virginia Symphony, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, California Symphony, and Sarasota Orchestra, as well as in a play-conduct role as guest leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, 92nd Street Y, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition, Kenney has been profiled by Musical America, Strings Magazine, and The New York Times, and has written for The Strad.

Chamber music continues to be a major part of Kenney’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Ojai, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto, as well as on tour with Musicians from Marlboro and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He is a founding member of Owls, a new quartet collective with violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko.

Born in Palo Alto, California in 1994, Kenney is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he received an Artist Diploma as a student of Miriam Fried and Donald Weilerstein. Previous teachers in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow by François-Nicolas Voirin.

Outside of music, Kenney enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends, and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat.

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The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), founded in 1997, has established a distinct sound and independent artistic identity. The Orchestra’s philosophy, inspired by founding mentor Claudio Abbado, emphasizes the power of listening and communication both structurally and musically; they call it The Sound of Listening. It allows the Orchestra, its musicians and managing office, to operate as a democratic collective. Engaging with Artistic Partners, including Mitsuko Uchida, Yuja Wang, Pekka Kuusisto, Conductor Laureate Daniel Harding, Artistic Advisor Daniele Gatti, and Artistic Partner for Immersive Experiences Henrik Oppermann/Schallgeber; the MCO undertakes multiyear projects that explore diverse artistic themes.

With musicians representing 27 nationalities, residing in different parts of the world, the MCO reaches live audiences across 40 countries on five continents. The Orchestra maintains residencies at renowned venues including Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Lucerne Festival, Mozartwoche Salzburg, and Festival de Saint-Denis. They are frequent guests at Philharmonie Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Musikverein Vienna, and Beethovenfest Bonn, and regularly tour Iberian and Asian regions. Their worldwide presence enables them to authentically engage with a global audience, fostering connections that resonate across borders and cultures.

In the realm of Outreach and Education, the MCO conducts three flagship projects. The MCO Academy allows orchestra members to share their expertise with the next generation of musicians in collaboration with Orchesterzentrum|NRW and undertake residencies at Konzerthaus Dortmund, Kölner Philharmonie and the Philharmonie Essen. Feel the Music introduces music to deaf and hard-of-hearing children, encouraging a multi-sensory experience. And Welcome Home: a concert about finding the place where you belong, in which school groups are invited on a multicultural journey, fostering introspection and contemplation on the theme of “Belonging”. These endeavors highlight the MCO’s commitment to enriching lives through music and promoting inclusivity.

In collaboration with Artistic Partner for Immersive Experiences Henrik Oppermann/Schallgeber, the MCO explores new digital technologies in and beyond the concert hall. Their virtual reality series immerses listeners deeper into performances and brings them closer to the music.

Through its vibrant performances, global reach, educational initiatives, and distinct entrepreneurship, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra continues to make a profound impact on the world of classical music.

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One of the most revered artists of our time, Mitsuko Uchida is known as a peerless interpreter of the works of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven, as well for being a devotee of the piano music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and György Kurtág.  She is Musical America’s 2022 Artist of the Year, and a Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist across the 2022/3, 2023/4 and 2024/5 seasons.  Her latest recording, of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, was released to critical acclaim earlier this year, has been nominated for a Grammy® Award, and won the 2022 Gramophone Piano Award.

She has enjoyed close relationships over many years with the world’s most renowned orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and – in the US – the Chicago Symphony and The Cleveland Orchestra, with whom she recently celebrated her 100th performance at Severance Hall.  Conductors with whom she has worked closely have included Bernard Haitink, Sir Simon Rattle, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Vladimir Jurowski, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, and Mariss Jansons.

Since 2016, Mitsuko Uchida has been an Artistic Partner of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom she is currently engaged on a multi-season touring project in Europe, Japan and North America.  She also appears regularly in recital in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York and Tokyo, and is a frequent guest at the Salzburg Mozartwoche and Salzburg Festival.

Mitsuko Uchida records exclusively for Decca, and her multi-award-winning discography includes the complete Mozart and Schubert piano sonatas.  She is the recipient of two Grammy® Awards – for Mozart Concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra, and for an album of lieder with Dorothea Röschmann – and her recording of the Schoenberg Piano Concerto with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra won the Gramophone Award for Best Concerto.

A founding member of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and Director of Marlboro Music Festival, Mitsuko Uchida is a recipient of the Golden Mozart Medal from the Salzburg Mozarteum, and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association. She has also been awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Wigmore Hall Medal, and holds Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 2009 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

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