Artist - Moab Music Festival

Michael has distinguished himself as a conductor with major orchestras here and abroad in the symphonic and operatic world. A protégé of Leonard Bernstein, he began his association with the renowned conductor and composer as a student in 1982, later serving as Maestro Bernstein’s assistant conductor from 1985–1990. Co-founder of both the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) and the Moab Music Festival, Michael was previously Director of the Tisch Center for the Arts and the 92nd Street Y in New York, and Chief Executive and General Director of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY.

Michael holds artistic leadership positions at the Moab Music Festival and NYFOS, and worked on the Leonard Bernstein Centennial as a producer, conductor, and pianist. A champion of new music, Michael has conducted and played premieres by nearly 100 composers and considers new music to be the lifeblood of American musical culture. He oversees NYFOS Next a series in New York City which examines the latest in songwriting by established and young composers. Dedicated to music education, he oversees the innovative education programs of the Moab Music Festival. He is also active in the creation of new educational programs for symphony orchestras in collaboration with Jamie Bernstein. Their programs have been performed throughout the US, Asia, Cuba, and Europe. Born in Guam and raised in California, Michael attended the University of California, Berkeley and is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Upcoming Performances:

Dec 6 – Holiday Concert

Dec 7 – Family Holiday Concert

Cellist Clancy Newman, first prize winner of the prestigious Naumburg International Competition and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, has had the unusual career of a performer/composer. He received his first significant public recognition at the age of twelve, when he won a Gold Medal at the Dandenong Youth Festival in Australia, competing against people twice his age. Since then, he has performed as soloist throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. He can often be heard on NPR’s “Performance Today” and has been featured on A&E and PBS. A sought after chamber musician, he is a member of the Clarosa piano quartet and a former member of Chamber Music Society Two of Lincoln Center and Musicians from Marlboro. As a composer, he has expanded cello technique in ways heretofore thought unimaginable, particularly in his “Pop-Unpopped” project, which been ongoing since 2014. He has also written numerous chamber works, and has been a featured composer on series by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Chicago Chamber Musicians. In March 2019, his piano quintet, commissioned by the Ryuji Ueno Foundation, was premiered at the opening ceremony of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC. Mr. Newman is a graduate of the five-year exchange program between Juilliard and Columbia University, receiving a M.M. from Juilliard and a B.A. in English from Columbia.

Praised by the Seattle Times as “Simply marvelous” and Taiwan’s Liberty Times for
“astonishingly capturing the spirit of the music,” violinist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu enjoys a
versatile career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator throughout North America,
Europe and Asia. Cindy has collaborated in concerts with renowned artists such as Yefim
Bronfman, Lynn Harrell, Leila Josefowicz, Cho-Liang Lin, Midori, Thomas Quasthoff, Yuja
Wang, and members of the Alban Berg, Emerson, Guarneri, Miró, and Tokyo string quartets
at prominent venues such as the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall,
Lincoln Center, and festivals such as Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Great Lakes
Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Summerfest, Marlboro Music Festival, and Santa Fe
Chamber Music Festival. She has also collaborated as a guest violist with the Dover, Orion,
and Shanghai quartets. Cindy is a recipient of many awards including the Milka Violin Artist
Prize from the Curtis Institute of Music, and third prize at the International Violin
Competition of David Oistrakh. She has taught at the Thornton School of Music of the

University of Southern California, and curated programs for the Da Camera Society in Los
Angeles as the Artistic Partner, and is currently the Music Director of New Asia Chamber
Music Society. Cindy plays on a 1918 Stefano Scarampella violin and a 2015 Stanley
Kiernoziak viola.

Michael has been described as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers” (The New York Times). Winner of a 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He makes regular appearances with orchestras such as the National Philharmonic, the Seattle, Grand Rapids, North Carolina, and Albany symphonies, and was selected by pianist András Schiff to perform an international solo recital tour, making debuts in Zurich’s Tonhalle and New York’s 92nd Street Y.

A prolific composer, Michael’s Piano Concerto was premiered in 2021 by the Kalamazoo Symphony. He was the composer and artist-in-residence at the New Haven Symphony for the 2017-19 seasons and a 2018 Copland House Award winner. He has appeared at the Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Marlboro, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Tippet Rise, Moab, Bridgehampton, and Bard music festivals and performs regularly with his longtime duo partner, cellist Nicholas Canellakis. He is the First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild competition, and earned degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. A native New Yorker, he lives there with his two 19th-century Steinway D’s, Octavia and Daria. michaelbrownmusic.com

Upcoming Performances:

Aug 29 – Grotto I: 19th Century Classics

Aug 30 – Floating Concert I: Keyboards on the Colorado

Kristin is a violinist of remarkable versatility and impeccable technique who enjoys a vibrant career as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and educator. She is a recipient of the 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a top-prize winner of the 2012 International Naumburg Violin Competition and the Astral Artists’ 2010 National Auditions. The Strad reports, “She seems entirely comfortable with stylistic diversity, which is one criterion that separates the run-of-the-mill instrumentalists from true artists.” Kristin has appeared as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Ural Philharmonic of Russia, Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra of China, Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional of Dominican Republic, and many others. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Kennedy Center, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ravinia Festival, the Louvre Museum in Paris, Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and Korea’s Kumho Art Gallery. An accomplished chamber musician, Kristin is a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, performing at Lincoln Center in New York and on tour with CMS throughout each season. She holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Itzhak Perlman and Donald Weilerstein and taught as Perlman’s assistant as a Starling Fellow. Kristin joined the faculty of University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as Assistant Professor of Violin, and is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Emerald City Music in Seattle. www.violinistkristinlee.com

Upcoming Performances:

Called “wholesome-looking” by the New York Times, Johnhas gained a reputation for performing new and unusual music around the globe. He was a founding member of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound and now serves both as JACK’s violist and Executive Director. John has appeared with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear and has performed as soloist with the Pasadena Symphony, Armenian Philharmonic, Wordless Music Orchestra, OSSIA, and with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra playing the solo part to Luciano Berio’s Chemins II under the direction of Pierre Boulez. He holds degrees from the Interlochen Arts Academy and Eastman School of Music where his primary teachers were David Holland and John Graham. John serves on the faculty of the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence.

Jay has been recognized around the world for approaching both old and new works with equally probing curiosity and emotional commitment. His performances have been described as “brilliant and insatiably inquisitive”, “electrifying”, and “prodigious” by the New York Times, and “gentle, poignant, and deeply moving” by the Washington Post. A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, Jay performed with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and was a curator for the New York Philharmonic’s 2016 Biennale. He has soloed in major venues around the globe including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, Avery Fisher Hall, and Lucerne’s KKL and performed recitals in Carnegie’s Weill Hall, the Kennedy, Mondavi, and Krannert centers. Dedicated to introducing audiences to the music of our time, Jay has worked closely with some of the most creative minds of the 20th/21st centuries including Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Matthias Pintscher, Kaija Saariaho, and countless others from his own generation. His close association with John Zorn has resulted in over a dozen works written for him including The Aristos, a Pulitzer Prize runner up resulting in the release of Hen to Pan (Tzadik), listed in the New York Times Best Recordings of 2015. Jay is the cellist of Junction Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao. He has been a guest at the Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Moab, HeidelbergerFruhling, DITTO, and Lincoln Center festivals. Jay serves on the faculty of the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence.

Upcoming Performances:

A native of Mallorca in the Balearic Islands of Spain, Francisco is making a name for himself as both a performer and a leader of innovative educational institutions. A recipient of the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant, he has performed as soloist with orchestras such as the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Spanish Radio Television Orchestra, Argentina’s National Orchestra, Venezuela’s Teresa Carreño Orchestra, and numerous U.S. ensembles including the Saint Paul and Philadelphia Chamber Orchestras, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Vancouver, Pacific, Alabama, and Maryland Symphony Orchestras. He has worked with such noted conductors as the late Sir Colin Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Alondra de la Parra, Christoph Poppen, Jeannette Sorrell, and Joshua Weilerstein.

This past May, Orchid Classics released Francisco’s new album, Bach’s Long Shadow, an exploration of Bach’s Partitas and their influence over the solo violin genre for the past three centuries. Fullana’s love for the sound of gut strings has also blossomed into an artistic partnership with the Grammy Award winning baroque ensemble Apollo’s Fire, both in performance and in the recording of Spanish and Italian baroque music.

Active as a chamber musician, Francisco is a performing member of The Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln. Francisco is also a committed innovator, leading new institutions of musical education for young people. He is a co-founder of San Antonio’s Classical Music Summer Institute, where he currently serves as Chamber Music Director. He also created the Fortissimo Youth Initiative, a series of music seminars and performances with youth orchestras, which aims to explore and deepen young musicians’ understanding of 18th-century music.

Francisco performs on the 1735 “Mary Portman” ex-Kreisler Guarneri del Gesù violin, kindly on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Upcoming Performances:

Sept 10 – Music Hike II: Free Voices of Eastern Europe

Sept 10 – The Four Seasons According to Glass and Piazzolla

Sept 11 – Grotto III: German Masterpieces

Eric is a fortepianist, modern pianist and composer. He has performed with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Toronto Symphony, among others. He will be performing Mozart’s C minor Concerto with Portland Baroque Orchestra in April 2019. He is a founder and Music Director of the Valley of the Moon Music Festival, a festival in Sonoma specializing in Classical and Romantic music on period instruments.

Eric is a member of the Zivian-Tomkins Duo, the Benvenue Fortepiano Trio, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. As a composer, he was awarded an ASCAP Jacob Druckman Memorial Commission to compose an orchestral work, Three Character Pieces, which was premiered by the Seattle Symphony in March 1998.

Eric studied piano with Gary Graffman and Peter Serkin and composition with Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, and Martin Bresnick. He attended the Tanglewood Music Center both as a performer and as a composer.

Cynthia is an esteemed violist whose wide-ranging career has taken her to stages across the world as soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and pedagogue. Principal Violist of the New York Philharmonic for over two decades, she is a regularly featured soloist with the orchestra both at home and abroad, in a variety of repertoire, including two world premieres written solely for her. Other concerto appearances have been with the Minnesota Orchestra, Shanghai, Vermont, Santa Barbara, Eastern Music Festival, and San Diego Symphonies, Orquesta Sinfonica de Bilbao, and Rochester and Hong Kong Philharmonics. Known for her emotional nuance, virtuosic technique, and plush tone, she is a founding member of both the New York Philharmonic String Quartet, and Les Amies trio, and is a frequent guest with chamber series across the globe. She has been featured in several nationwide “Live from Lincoln Center” telecasts, on National Public Radio, Radio France, Italy‘s RAI, and in regular broadcasts from the 92Y, including collaborations with Emanuel Ax and Daniil Trifonov. She is on the faculty of the Juilliard School Shanghai Academy, Music Academy of the West, and Mannes College of Music.

Upcoming Performances:

Aug 28 – A Movable, Musical Feast

Aug 29 – Grotto I: 19th Century Classics

Aug 31 – Music Hike I: Mozart in the Morning

Aug 31 – Red Cliffs I: Colorado Currents

Sep 1 – Red Cliffs II: BAILEN

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