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RAVINIA’S STEANS MUSIC INSTITUTE
11
RSMI
ALUMNI HIGHLIGHTS
• The Ariel Quartet
(’06) released its debut album in February
2018, featuring works by Béla Bartók and Johannes Brahms.
• Kevin Murphy
, director of the Program for Singers, was named
the artistic director of the International Vocal Arts Institute in Tel
Aviv, Israel. He will spend the month of July in Israel before arriving
at RSMI to lead the vocal program.
• During the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2018/19 season, three RSMI
Program for Singers alumni will be featured onstage:
▪
Janai Brugger
(’11) –
Idomeneo
– Ilia
▪
David Portillo
(’11) –
Idomeneo
– Arbace
▪
Diana Newman
(’14) –
Siegfried
– Woodbird
• Soprano
Michelle Areyzaga
(’01) performed a selection of
Bernstein songs with Welz Kauffman on piano for the Pilgrim Players
concert in Highland Park, IL, on Sunday, March 11. Cellist
Stephen
Honigberg
(’88) was also featured on the concert.
•
Roxy Coss
(’11) was awarded the Emerging Artists Project Grant, a
four-year grant that provides musicians with the support they need to
firmly establish themselves and make a living in New York City.
• RSMI Program for Singers alumni took home three of the six awards
given at the George London Foundation Awards Competition in New
York in February 2018. Mezzo-sopranos
Raehann Bryce-Davis
(’17),
Emily D’Angelo
(’15, ’16), and
Rihab Chaieb
(’12) each took home
$10,000 for their performances in the competition.
• Violinist
Anna Göckel
(’16, ’17) released her first CD, comprising
Bach’s solo violin partitas and sonatas, with NoMadMusic. As
credited in her CD, she recorded on a 1690 Giovanni Tononi violin,
on loan from RSMI’s instrument bank.
• Violist
Matthew Lipman
(’12, ’13) will be joining the Stony
Brook University music conservatory faculty as an artist-in-residence
beginning in the fall of 2018.
• Soprano
Devony Smith
(’17) was a finalist in the Oratorio Society
of New York’s Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo competition. Devony
will be spending her summer at the Eva and Marc Stern SongFest–LA
Opera Fellowship Program, singing Julia de Burgos in Bernstein’s
Songfest.
• Cellist
Blaise Déjardin
(’07, ’08) was recently appointed the
principal cellist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He is only the
14th cellist to fill the position in the orchestra’s 136-year history.
• In March, pianist
Drew Petersen
(’17) received an Avery Fisher
Career Grant from the Lincoln Center. The award provides $25,000 to
aid in advancing a young performer’s career.
• Violinist
Pekka Kuusisto
(’95, ’96) was heralded as “the David
Bowie of the fiddle” in a review of his September 2017 performance
of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto from the Royal Albert Music Hall.
The concert was his debut on the BBC Proms concert series, which
was founded in 1895.
• The Dover Quartet, featuring RSMI alumni
Joel Link
(’09) and
Bryan Lee
(’09, ’10) released their album
Voices of Defiance
in
October 2017. The album, which is the quartet’s second on Cedille
Records, features three quartets written during World War II,
including Viktor Ullmann’s String Quartet No. 3, written from the
confines of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
• Cellist
Narek Hakhnazaryan
(’08, ’09) premiered his own
arrangement of the “Meditation” from Massenet’s opera
Thaïs
at a
recital at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in April. His
recital received a glowing review from the
Washington Post
.
• Cellist
Earl Lee
(’07) has been appointed associate conductor
of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, beginning his tenure in
September.
• Violin faculty member
Pamela Frank
is the jury chair for the
Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists, the
world’s leading competition for young emerging violinists.
• Pianist
Ying Li
(’16, ’17) received first prize in the senior division
of the 2018 WDAV Young Chamber Music competition with her trio,
the AYA Trio. The prize included a two-day recording session and a
paid performance on the 2018/19 Davidson College Concert Series.
• Soprano
Nadine Sierra
(’12) took home the Beverly Sills Artist
Award in April 2018, given to extraordinarily gifted singers between
the ages of 25 and 40 who have appeared in featured solo roles at the
Metropolitan Opera. This award came just a few months after Sierra
took home the Richard Tucker Award in late 2017, a prestigious
award given to an American singer poised on the edge of a major
national and international career.
• Bassist
Linda May Han Oh
(’08) became a founding member of a
new music collective, We Have Voice, which was featured in the
New
York Times
in April 2018 for their creation of a code of conduct to
promote safe workplaces in the performing arts.
Mezzo-soprano
Raehann Bryce-
Davis performs
on the BGH stage
during the 2017
Program for
Singers.
The Argus Quartet on stage at Ravinia’s 2017 Annual Meeting.