Randall Hodgkinson Sharan Leventhal Jonathan
Miller
BIOs
JONATHAN MILLER
Before joining the Boston Symphony in 1971, Jonathan Miller held
appointments as principal cellist of the Juilliard, Hartford, and San
Diego symphonies. In addition, as a winner of the Jeunesses Musicales
auditions, he was awarded a Carnegie Recital Hall debut.
Despite the considerable successes achieved early in his career,
Miller came to the instrument relatively late. He was already a student
of literature at the University of California at Berkeley when a master
class given by Pablo Casals inspired him to change course and devote
his life to the cello.
At that point, Miller began studies with Bernard Greenhouse of the
Beaux Arts Trio. Miller also sought out the great pedagogues of
different schools, such as Garbousova, Rose, Shapiro, and Lustgarten,
and played in the master classes of Piatigorsky, Fournier, and
Rostropovitch. Nine years after the initial Casals encounter, the great
cellist was to publicly acclaim Miller an outstanding exponent of Bach.
Miller is founder and artistic director of the Boston Artists
Ensemble. Created in 1980, the group presented in its first year 20
live concerts at WGBH in Boston. These performances were simultaneously
broadcast nation-wide to 80 stations. The Boston Artists Ensemble is
the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council for
the Arts.
Additional chamber music credits include Boston Symphony and
Tanglewood chamber music prelude concerts, and two seasons touring the
United States with the New York String Sextet. He has also appeared as
a member of the Fine Arts Quartet.
Miller has performed as soloist with the Boston Pops, Hartford
Symphony, and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra of Boston. In 1990,
at the invitation of Rostropovitch, he was a soloist at the American
Cello Congress. He appeared a second time in 1996.
Miller has taught at New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory,
and at Boston University at Tanglewood.
SHARAN LEVENTHAL
Since winning the Kranischsteiner Musikpreis at the 1984 International
Contemporary Music Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, violinist Sharan
Leventhal has built an international reputation as a champion of
contemporary music. Her more than 100 premieres include works written
by Gunther Schuller, Virgil Thomson, William Kraft, Pauline Oliveros,
Taina León, and Simon Bainbridge.
Equally active in traditional venues, Leventhal has appeared as a
soloist with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra; the Toledo,
Milwaukee, Gulf Coast, Topeka, Dayton and Albany symphonies; and the
Wisconsin and Cleveland chamber orchestras, among others. In addition
to the trio, she is a member of the Kepler Quartet, and the Boston
Artists Ensemble, and appears regularly with the contemporary ensemble,
Present Music.
Leventhal has received grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Fromm Foundation, the Australia Council for the Arts, the
Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the Aaron Copland Fund for
Music Recording.
She has recorded broadcasts for the BBC, ORF (Austria), Musikradion
(Sweden), WGBH-Boston, and WNYC. Her compact disc recordings include
the entire violin and piano works of Virgil Thomson for the
Northeastern Recordings label, a Kepler Quartet recording of string
quartets by Ben Johnston for New World, as well as discs on the GM
Recordings, and Catalyst/BMG labels by her critically acclaimed duo
Marimolin. Leventhal teaches at The Boston Conservatory of Music,
Interlochen Arts Camp, coaches for the Asian Youth Orchestra in Hong
Kong, and has served on the faculties of Michigan State University, and
the Berklee College of Music. She presents seminars and master classes
throughout the United States and Europe, and has taught regularly at
the Bruckner-Konservatorium in Linz, Austria. She is the founder and
director of Play On, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to
promoting active participation in music making.
RANDALL HODGKINSON
Randall Hodgkinson, grand prize winner of the International American
Music Competition sponsored by Carnegie Hall and the Rockefeller
Foundation, has performed with orchestras in Atlanta, Philadelphia,
Buffalo, Boston, Cleveland and abroad in Italy and Iceland.
In addition he has performed numerous recital programs spanning the
repertoire from J.S. Bach to Donald Martino. He is an artist member of
the Boston Chamber Music Society and performs the four-hand and
two-piano repertoire with his wife Leslie Amper.
Festival appearances include Blue Hill-Maine, Bargemusic, Chestnut
Hill Concerts in Madison Connecticut, Seattle Chamber music Festival,
Chamber Music Northwest (Portland, OR) and Mainly Mozart in San Diego,
CA. A CD of solo piano music on the Ongaku label has recently been
released to critical acclaim. Other recordings include a live world
premiere of the Gardner Read Piano Concerto for Albany records.
During the 2001-2002 season, Mr. Hodgkinson made his solo debut with
the Boston Symphony Orchestra which was repeated in Carnegie Hall.
Mr. Hodgkinson is on the faculties of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and the Longy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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