BAHLEST EEBLE FACULTY
2018

Chiara String Quartet

In a spirit of tremendous gratitude and love, the Chiara String Quartet has made the decision to end full-time work together in September of 2018, following a rich and diverse 18-year performance career. Their appearance as faculty guest performers at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music will happen during their farewell season of 2017-2018.

Together, quartet members Rebecca Fischer, Hyeyung Yoon, Jonah Sirota, and Gregory Beaver pioneered new ways to engage audiences in the 21st century, including their Chamber Music in Any Chamber performances in bars and clubs (which led to a resurgence in alternate-venue chamber music performance), and their commitment to performing from memory, or By Heart.

The Chiara Quartet recorded the complete quartets of Bartok and Brahms for Azica records, recorded the 2nd and 3rd quartets of Jefferson Friedman for New Amsterdam Records, and recorded works by Robert Siorta and Gabriela Lena Frank for their own label, New Voice Singles.

The group held residencies at diverse institutions, including Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where they served as faculty and Hixson-Lied Artists-in-Residence for 13 years. Highlights of their performance career include cycles of the complete quartets of Bartok performed from memory at Ravinia and at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Beethoven cycles at Harvard and at the University of Nebraska, and tours of Sweden, South Korea, and China.

Although the members of the group are each planning solo performance and teaching careers moving forward, the group plans to reunite regularly for special projects and performance opportunities.

Del Sol String Quartet

Hailed by Gramophone as “masters of all musical things they survey” and two-time winner of the top Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the Del Sol String Quartet shares living music with an ever-growing community of adventurous listeners.

Recognized as a “vigorous champion of living composers”, Del Sol has premiered well over 100 works through its extensive commissioning and innovative performances.  The composers represent a diverse range of contemporary voices, including Terry Riley, Mason Bates, Frederic Rzewski, Ben Johnston, Gabriela Lena Frank, Chinary Ung, Tania León, Ken Ueno, Peter Sculthorpe, Reza Vali, Mohammed Fairouz and Per Nørgård.

Many of these works are included in Del Sol’s eclectic discography — nine, critically-acclaimed, full-length albums that reflect the ensemble’s fascination with the intersection of place and culture. PopMatters praised Del Sol’s “unfettered mastery” on the “addictive” “Dark Queen Mantra” (2017, Sono Luminus), featuring a collaboration with guitarist Gyan Riley and world premiere recordings of music by Terry Riley and Stefano Scodanibbio. The NY Times questioned, when listening to Scrapyard Exotica (2015) “if your foot can stay still once you put on this funky disc of rhythmically infectious…music played by the adventurous Del Sol String Quartet.”

With its deep commitment to education, Del Sol has reached thousands of K-12 students through inventive school performances, workshops, coaching and residencies. The Quartet members also have worked closely with student composers, musicians and faculty artists at universities across the country, including Dartmouth, MIT, Brandeis, Northeastern, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, University of New Mexico, University of California at Berkeley, San Diego, and Santa Cruz, Chapman, Augustana, Illinois State, the Peabody Institute, the Manhattan School of Music and San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

http://delsolquartet.com/

Duo Cortona

Duo Cortona is a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to the creation of works for its unique instrumentation: mezzo-soprano and violin.  This ensemble explores new sounds and possibilities for its intimate, expressive, and vital combination.  Duo Cortona works to establish a new and thus far unexplored repertoire, pursuing the endless possibilities of this union. Recent and upcoming performances include theResonant Bodies Festival,  The Stone, the SONiC Festival, New Music on the Point, and Contemporary Undercurrent of Song Project (Princeton).

As an internationally recognized leading interpreter of contemporary and modern music, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway brings versatility and compelling insight to stages worldwide.  Her work has been praised by the New York Times for “penetrating clarity” and “considerable depth of expression” and by Opera News for her “adept musicianship and dramatic flair.”

Violinist Ari Streisfeld has garnered critical acclaim worldwide for his performances of diverse repertoire and has established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music. Praised for his “dazzling performance” by the New York Times and “scintillating playing” by New York Classical Review, Mr. Streisfeld is a founding member of the world renowned JACK Quartet. Recent season highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall (London), La Salle Pleyel (Paris), Teatro Colon (Argentina), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Carriage Works (Sydney, Australia), Venice Biennale (Italy), Carnegie Hall, The Library of Congress, The Morgan Library (New York), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), and the Salzburg Festival (Austria). He has collaborated with many of today’s most prominent composers including John Luther Adams, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, Matthias Pintscher, Georg Friedrich Haas, Steve Reich, and Salvatore Sciarrino.

www.duocortona.com

ZOFO

Since joining forces in 2009 as ZOFO, a professional duo, internationally acclaimed solo pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi have electrified audiences from Carnegie Hall in New York city to Tokyo, Japan with their dazzling artistry and outside-the-box thematic programming for piano-four-hands. This Grammy-nominated, prize-winning Steinway Artist Ensemble - one of only a handful of duos worldwide devoted exclusively to piano duets - is blazing a bold new path for four-hands groups by focusing on 20th and 21st century repertoire and by commissioning new works from noted composers each year.

ZOFO, which is shorthand for 20-finger orchestra (ZO=20 and FO=finger orchestra), also performs heart-pumping duet arrangements of famous orchestral pieces such as Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," exploring the realms in which many composers first experienced their symphonic visions.  They believe that the piano duet is the most intimate form of chamber music, with two musicians playing individual parts on one instrument in a complex, often beautiful choreography of four hands.

www.zofoduet.com