![]() But this festival is a vehicle for something much bigger than just this one instrument – it is about the life force of music.’ There is something about a one- instrument festival that leads to this kind of total immersion – in the cello, the players and the repertoire. ![]() ‘A festival audience is looking for, and curious about, works that they’re not familiar with,’ he says. It is, he says, a vision very much aided and abetted by the festival format. If Gehry intended to surprise and demystify classical music with his architectural design, Kirshbaum has a similar outlook for the festival he founded and has directed since its Manchester incarnation, launched almost two decades ago. It is a programme as bold and arresting as the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall – with its curvaceous petal-like shell and gregarious interior – and it perfectly encapsulates one of the veteran US cellist’s statements of intent: to intrigue concertgoers with the new, the much-loved and the wholly unexpected. Ralph Kirshbaum is describing the concept behind one of the centrepiece concerts at this year’s Piatigorsky International Cello Festival. ’I started with an idea for a programme that would build upwards: beginning with one of the greatest chamber works in the repertoire, Schubert’s Quintet, which has two cellos followed by Brett Dean’s Twelve Angry Men, which has twelve cellos, and finishing with 100 cellos filling the stage at the Walt Disney Concert Hall for Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras no.1 for mass cello ensemble and the world premiere of a new work by the British composer Anna Clyne, Threads & Traces.’ He received his masters and doctoral degrees from Juilliard, studying with renown cellist Zara Nelsova and writing on the playing of Emanuel Feuermann.Classics reconsidered: the Sakura cello ensemble drew on a rich heritage of repertoire at the festival ![]() Smith was admitted part-time to Arizona State University, studying mathematics, music and German, and he completed a B.A. His performances have been broadcast throughout the world including, in the US, on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s Performance Today and Symphonycast. He was previously a member of the New York Philharmonic and the principal cellist of the San Diego and Fort Worth symphonies. Smith is the principal cellist of the Houston Symphony and a faculty member of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. ![]() As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Cho-Liang Lin, Lynn Harrell, Sarah Chang, Dawn Upshaw and members of the Beaux Arts Trio and the Guarneri, Emerson, Juilliard, Cleveland, and Berg quartets. His debut recording of Miklós Rózsa’s Cello Concerto with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra won widespread international critical acclaim, with Gramophone praising Smith as a “hugely eloquent, impassioned soloist,” and his recording of chamber music of Fauré with Gil Shaham was chosen by numerous critics as one of the year’s best albums. Hailed by Newsday for “extraordinary musicianship…forceful, sophisticated and entirely in the spirit of the music,” cellist Brinton Smith continues to win rave reviews for virtuosic performances with musical ideals rooted in the golden age of string playing. As Stravinsky said in that era, “Hollywood is the center of the music world!” Representing virtually every facet the musical spectrum, they included Joseph Achron, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hans Eisler, George Gershwin, Louis Gruenberg, Bernard Hermann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Krenek, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Miklós Rózsa, Arnold Schoenberg, Max Steiner, Igor Stravinsky, Alexandre Tansman, Ernst Toch, Franz Waxman, Kurt Weill, and Erich Zeisl. However, perhaps most remarkably, Los Angeles hosted a gathering of compositional talent in a single city that was arguably unprecedented since 1800s Vienna. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler. Performers living in Los Angeles during this era included Jascha Heifetz, William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Lotte Lehmann and, for the last several summers of his life, Emanuel Feuermann (After a trio concert with Heifetz and Piatigorsky, Rubinstein once quipped, “not bad for local talent!”) The émigrés also included literary and cultural figures including Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Dylan Thomas, Bertrand Russell, W.
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