Belvedere Chamber Music Festival

Festival Artists

For several decades, cellist Craig Hultgren has been a fixture on the scenes for new music, the newly creative arts, and the avant-garde. In recent years, he has performed solo concerts and chamber music in Rome, Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami, Atlanta, Orlando, Denver, Memphis and San Antonio. A recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, he was a member for many years of Thámyris, a contemporary chamber music ensemble in Atlanta. A cellist in the Alabama Symphony, he also plays in Luna Nova, a new music ensemble with a large repertoire of performances available as podcast downloads on iTunes. Hultgren is featured in three solo CD recordings including The Electro-Acoustic Cello Book on Living Artist Recordings. In 2004, the Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival 48-Hour Scramble cited him for the best soundtrack creation for the film The Silent Treatment. For ten years, he produced the Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial, an international competition that highlighted the best new compositions for the instrument. He teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham-Southern College where he directs the BSC New Music Ensemble. He is a founding member and former President of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance and is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Youth Orchestras of Birmingham. Hultgren is a CAMA artist (Collaborating Artists Manifesting Adventure) with the St. Louis New Music Circle and will be presenting programs there for three seasons.

Adam Bowles is becoming increasingly active on the contemporary art-music scene, performing frequently in the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, Artburst, and similar venues for new music. Dr. Bowles is a native of Los Angeles who holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He obtained his Bachelor of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music, and received his Master of Music at the New England Conservatory of Music. His main teachers have been Milton Stern, Barry Snyder, Jacob Maxin, and Eugene and Elizabeth Pridonoff. He has also received periodic coaching with Richard Goode, Malcolm Bilson, and Seymour Lipkin. He is now an instructor on the Birmingham-Southern College Conservatory faculty where he teaches the two highest levels of music theory in addition to maintaining a studio of private students. At the college level he teaches Accompanying and both years of Keyboard Harmony for music majors.

John McMurtery is section flutist of the New York City Opera Orchestra, and substitutes regularly with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, and the OK Mozart Festival Orchestra. He has appeared as soloist with the New York Symphonic Ensemble, the Artemis Chamber Ensemble, the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, and the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival. As an advocate for contemporary music, McMurtery performs with the Memphis-based ensemble Luna Nova and the Society for Chromatic Art (New York). Adding to his discography, he recorded for the NAXOS label as principal flutist on the collaborative disc of world premieres by award-winning composer Sean Hickey. During the 2006-07 school year, McMurtery was appointed Visiting Professor of Flute at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and has also taught at Westminster Conservatory in Princeton, NJ. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New York Flute Club, co-chairing the annual Flute Fair. McMurtery graduated in 2005 from The Juilliard School with a Doctor of Music Arts degree, where he studied with Jeanne Baxtresser, Julius Baker, and Robert Langevin. Previous teachers include Bart Feller at Rutgers University (MM '99) and Dr. Hal Ott at Central Washington University (BM '97).

Jennifer Rhodes is in her second season as principal bassoonist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. She holds Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Music degree and Performer’s Certificate from Eastman School of Music. Her major teachers are Frank Morelli and John Hunt. Before moving to Memphis, Dr. Rhodes enjoyed a busy freelance career in New York City where she performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and Opera Orchestras, and the American Ballet Theater Orchestra. An active chamber musician, she has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the North Country Chamber Players. She recently recorded Jonathan Dawe’s woodwind quintet “Fractal Farm” on the Furious Artisans label and can also be heard playing principal bassoon on Itzhak Perlman’s 1998 EMI recording “Concertos From My Childhood,” accompanied by the Juilliard Orchestra.

Nobuko Igarashi, a native of Memphis, is the principal bass clarinetist with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. She received the BM and MM degrees in clarinet performance from Indiana University at Bloomington. Her principal teachers at IU were Eli Eban and James Campbell. Ms. Igarashi has also studied with Howard Klug, Alfred Prinz, Hakan Rosengren and Dennis Smylie. Since joining Luna Nova she has performed in concerts at the Beethoven Club of Memphis, the Belvedere Chamber Music Festival and at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Robert G. Patterson holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Pennsylvania. His mentors include George Crumb, John Baur, and Don Freund. His compositions have been performed from South Africa to Norway and Spain to Seattle. Among the awards he has received are the 2004 National Symphony Orchestra Residency Commission, 1999 University of Michigan Bands Commission and the 1994 International Composition Prize from the City of Tarragona in Spain. In addition to his musical activities, Patterson helps develop PC-based hotel software for Hilton Hotels, and his interest in computers has led him to become an expert in musical engraving using a computer.

Susanna Perry Gillmore has been concertmaster of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra since 1997, maintains an active schedule of solo recitals and chamber music collaborations throughout the country. Ms. Gilmore currently serves as Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Violin at the University of Memphis and this summer will return to Interlochen Summer Arts Camp as the Valade Violin Fellow. She has been on the summer faculty of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, Tennessee Governor's School for the Arts, Hot Springs Music Festival in Arkansas, Washington Island Chamber Music Festival in Wisconsin, and as an instructor of Celtic fiddle at the Memphis Suzuki Institute. Ms. Gilmore received her Bachelor's in Music at Oxford University in England and spent a year of post-graduate study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she studied with violinist Yfrah Neaman. She received her Master's degree in Violin Performance at New England Conservatory under the instruction of James Buswell. Prior to her studies in England Ms. Gilmore studied with Christian Teal at the Blair School of Music and with Mimi Zweig at Indiana University. Ms. Gilmore has recorded for the Naxos, Dorian, Island and Cadre record labels.

Andrew Drannon completed a M.M. degree in music composition under Kamran Ince at the University of Memphis. He holds a B.A. in music from Rhodes College, where he studied composition under Brandon Goff. He won first place in the Associated Colleges of the South Composition Contest in 2005 and the NITLE Composition Contest in 2006, and was twice named a finalist in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Competition. He participated in the 2007 International Summer Academy of Music in Michelstadt, Germany, and his works have been featured in master classes with Annie Gosfield, Claude Baker, and Stephen Paulus. He has received numerous piano and organ performance awards and performs in the Contemporary Chamber Players at the University of Memphis, where he has premiered chamber works by Kamran Ince, a multi-tracked open-form keyboard piece by Daniel Lentz and works by student composers.

Carol Rodland, violist, made her solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age seventeen. Praised by Fanfare for possessing a tone which is “larger than life, sweetly in tune, and infinitely variegated” and for her “delicious” playing, she presently enjoys an international career as a concert and recording artist and pedagogue. Recent performances have taken her throughout the Americas and Europe, and her solo recordings on the Crystal and Neuma labels have been critically acclaimed. A Fulbright Scholar, she holds degrees from the Juilliard School and the Musikhochschule Freiburg. She has held professorships at New England Conservatory, where she was recognized in 2005 with the “Krasner Award for Excellence in Teaching”, at the Musikhochschule “Hanns Eisler” Berlin, at Arizona State University, and as guest faculty at the Juilliard School. In 2008 she was appointed to a tenured professorship at the Eastman School of Music.

Catherine Rodland, Artist in Residence in Organ and Music Theory at St. Olaf College graduated cum laude with departmental distinction in organ performance from St. Olaf in 1987. She received her MM and DMA from the Eastman School of Music where she was a student of Russell Saunders. While at Eastman she received the prestigious Performer's Certificate and the Ann Anway Award for excellence in organ performance. Catherine is a prizewinner in the 1994 and 1998 American Guild of Organists Young Artists Competition, and 1994 Calgary International Organ Competition, and first prize in the 1989 International Organ Competition at the University of Michigan. During the summer of 2002 Catherine had a concert tour of Germany giving performances in Berlin and Brandenburg. She co-authored the book "Choristers' Training Program" for the Royal School of Church Music in America, a manual for childrens' choir education. Her advanced childrens' choir toured England in the summer of 2001, singing services at Ely Cathedral, Ripon Cathedral, and York Minster.

An Artist Associate in Voice in the Department of Music at Davidson College, contralto Diane Thornton has distinguished herself as a concert artist, opera singer and recitalist across the country. Concert engagements include appearances with the Bach Aria Group, the New England Symphonic Ensemble at Carnegie Hall; the National Chorale at Lincoln Center; and the Charlotte, Kansas City, Winston-Salem, Roanoke, and North Carolina symphony orchestras. Operatic engagements include roles with the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Opera Carolina, Gold Coast Opera, Piedmont Opera Theater, Minikin Opera and Pennsylvania Opera Theater. She has premiered American operas through the Billings Institute of American Music and the Contemporary Opera Company of America; and has premiered works by American composers in recital through venues such as the Shakespeare Concerts in Boston, the Davidson College Concert Series, The Penn Composers Guild, the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, the College Music Society and the Weymouth Center Artist Series.

Since completing his composition studies at the University of Chicago in 2003, Mark Volker has developed a growing reputation as a versatile composer and guitarist. His music has been performed and recorded by many prominent performers including the Contemporary Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, the Pacifica String Quartet, Musica Moderna Poland, the Pinotage ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Gryphon Trio, the Kiev Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes, So Percussion, Luna Nova, the Orquesta de Baja California, the Society for New Music, and the Boston Brass. His music has also been and featured at many major music festivals and conferences. He has received awards from ASCAP, SCI, ERMmedia, and Meet the Composer. In addition, Mark has premiered over a dozen works for guitar. Later this summer, Centaur records will release Elemental Forces, a collection of Mark’s recent works inspired by natural phenomena. Having taught for several years at Colgate University, Mark recently joined the faculty of the Belmont University School of Music (Nashville, TN) as coordinator of composition activities.

Esther Gray is a graduate of the Indiana University School of Music in Voice Performance. She was recently seen in a four week run of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris with Playhouse on the Square in Memphis. She was also seen there as Franca in The Light in the Piazza for which she was nominated for an 2009 Ostrander Award for “Best Supporting Actress in a Musical”. Esther has performed the roles of Daisy in The Gypsy Princess, Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, Echo in Ariadne auf Naxos, Adele in Die Fledermaus, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Esther has been seen with the Lyric Opera of San Diego, Harrower Opera Workshop of Atlanta and locally with the Jackson Symphony, Jackson Theatre Guild and the Dixie Carter Performing Arts Center, where she has served as musical director. Esther has a private vocal studio and is currently Director of the Innovation Choral Ensemble at Jackson State Community College.

Belvedere Chamber Festival, 1794 Carr Avenue, Memphis, TN 38104, 901-278-2699 pgray@pgray.net
produced by Luna Nova Music (www.lunanova.org)