Jennifer Culp, Violoncello
Jennifer Culp, cellist of the Feinsmith quartet, has been an active chamber musician for the past 25 years. She is currently on the collegiate faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Ms. Culp was a member of the Kronos Quartet for seven years from 1998, during which time her busy international career included appearances at Sydney Opera House, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, London's Barbican Centre, Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and WOMAD Festival in New Zealand. The quartet won many international and national awards including Musical America's 2003 "Musicians of the Year" and a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of Berg's Lyric Suite in 2004. Ms. Culp has collaborated with artists such as Zakir Hussein, Dawn Upshaw, Tom Waits, Sandor Vegh, Asha Bhosle and Irina Schnittke. She received a B.M. and M.M from the San Francisco and
New England Conservatories, studying with Bonnie Hampton and Laurence Lesser. Ms. Culp was also cellist with the Dunsmuir Piano Quartet, Empryean Ensemble, Philadelphia String Quartet, San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and has recorded numerous world premieres for Nonesuch, New Albion, CRI, Orion, New World and Sony.
MICHAEL MANRING, Bass. Michael is an electric bassist from the San Francisco Bay Area (Northern California). In addition to a tenure as the in-house bassist for Windham Hill Records, Manring has recorded with Michael Hedges, Alex Skolnick (in the bands Skol-Patrol and Attention Deficit, also featuring Tim Alexander from Primus), Larry Kassin, Tom Darter, Steve Morse, David Cullen, and many other noted musicians. He has been a member of Yo Miles!, Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's Miles Davis tribute band, since its inception. He remains active, touring the world for performances and clinics. Manring studied with Jaco Pastorius.
Manring is regarded as a technical virtuoso, using the bass as a solo instrument and frequently taking advantage of unusual alternate tunings. Manring occasionally plays on two (or even three) basses at the same time during live performances.
He is known for playing and endorsing Zon basses -- specifically, the Zon Hyperbass, an unusually flexible four-stringed instrument which Manring co-designed with Joseph Zon.
Manring is now performing with guitarist Alex de Grassi and percussionist Chris Garcia in the De Mania trio.
Some of his albums:
*Thonk
*Drastic Measures
*Unusual Weather
*Toward The Center Of The Night
*The Book of Flame
*Soliloquy
*Scatter (with Larry Kassin and Tom Darter)
*Equilibre (with guitarist David Cullen)
*Attention Deficit (with Attention Deficit)
*The Idiot King (with Attention Deficit)
*Controlled by Radar (with McGill/Manring/Stevens)
*Addition by Subtraction (with McGill/Manring/Stevens)
GYAN RILEY, Guitar. Born in northern California in 1977, has emerged as a prominent figure of guitar and contemporary music, both as a performer and composer. In 1999, he became the first graduate level guitarist ever to be awarded a full merit-based scholarship from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Gyan’s awards include First Prize in the Portland International Guitar Festival Competition, First Prize in the San Francisco Conservatory Guitar Concerto Competition, and First Prize in the Music in the Mountains Young Musicians Competition. Gyan played in the American premiere of John Adams’ El Nino, with David Tanenbaum, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and the San Francisco Symphony. Concert tours have taken him to some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls in the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Croatia, Turkey, Norway, and throughout the United States. Gyan tours regularly with the Europe based World Guitar Ensemble, the Los Angeles based Falla Guitar Trio, and father/composer/pianist Terry Riley. Gyan has been commissioned to write various works, some of which were released on Gyan’s debut CD Food for the Bearded, on the New Albion record label. Following Gyan’s solo appearance at Carnegie Recital Hall, he was invited to premiere a newly commissioned solo original work as part of a performance for the 2006 New York Guitar Festival. Gyan served as the artistic director for the San Francisco Classical Guitar Society from 2002-2004, and as professor of guitar at Humboldt State University for the 2005-2006 academic year.
CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR, Piano. "Those who know the pianist Christopher Taylor tend to speak of him in the hushed, reverent tones typically reserved for natural wonders if not the otherworldly. Colleagues trip over words like "innocence," "fervor," "beauty" and "vision" in an attempt to capture his elusive personality. Critics praise his virtuosity, his cerebral interpretations tempered by an aching tenderness, his unconventional programming and his advocacy of late-20th-century music." So goes the opening of the recent New York Times preview article about this remarkable young American pianist, an artist pursuing a varied and truly acclaimed career.
While Taylor has a well-earned reputation for his exquisite performances of Bach and his exciting performances of romantic piano concertos, he has captured the attention of the music world with his recent tour de force programming of Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus,. "Before a rapt audience at the Miller Theater on Saturday night, Mr. Taylor, a lanky 31-year-old pianist who graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard, gave an astonishing performance of Messiaen's complete "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus," more than two hours of some of the most complex and difficult music ever written for the piano. And he played the 176-page score from memory."
Christopher Taylor has been heard in performance with the New York Philharmonic, the Buffalo and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the National Symphony, and the Symphonies of Atlanta, Houston, Fort Worth, among many others in the U.S. and abroad. Recently honored with an Avery Fisher Career Grant, he is the winner of the Kapell Competition, the Gilmore Young Artist Award, and the Bronze Medal at the Van Cliburn Competition.
During the 2005/2006 concert season, Taylor's schedule includes performances of the extraordinary Ligeti Etudes at the University of California - Berkeley and at the Gardner Museum in Boston. He performed the complete Bach Goldberg Variations at the Tuscan Sun Festival, then again on a two-manual Steinway at the University of Wisconsin, immediately returning to a traditional instrument for a performance at the Arts Club of Chicago. This season includes the first performances his three-year Complete Beethoven Sonata cycle, as well as concerto appearances with the Memphis Symphony and the National Philharmonic at the new Strathmore Hall, among others.
Christopher Taylor was propelled into the music pages of the nation's newspapers when he became the first American since 1981 to reach the finals in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1993). He then went on to win the Bronze Medal, and his resulting CD has won critical acclaim. Prior to his performances at the Cliburn, Mr. Taylor was one of the first four recipients of the Gilmore Young Artists Award (1990), a scholarship for exceptionally promising American pianists aged 22 or younger. Shortly thereafter he took first prize in the William Kapell International Piano Competition, which was held at the University of Maryland and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
Since his first solo recital at ten he has given concerts in many cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Baltimore and Denver and dozens of communities in the U.S. and abroad. He has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, the Seoul Philharmonic, the Fort Worth Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, and with numerous other orchestras. He has appeared at the Ravinia Festival, and (on several occasions) at the Colorado Music Festival, among others.
Mr. Taylor began his piano studies in his native Boulder, Colorado, under Julie Bees, and has since studied with Francisco Aybar, Russell Sherman, and Maria Curcio Diamand. While pursuing his musical career he also attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in mathematics in 1992. Mr. Taylor maintains many other active interests, including composition (a field in which he has won several awards), music theory, linguistics, bicycling, and hiking. Christopher Taylor is on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Press For Christopher Taylor
"To tackle a handful of György Ligeti's explosive and intricate piano etudes shows a degree of bravery and dedication. To play all 28 of them, as Christopher Taylor did in a magnificent recital in Berkeley's Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon, is a Herculean undertaking... [Taylor] seemed almost to shrug off the difficulties involved. It isn't that he made the performance seem effortless -- no one could do that, nor would it be a good idea if they could -- but that he incorporated the very idea of difficulty into the essence of the performance. " San Francisco Chronicle, November 2005
"But most of the études are vehemently intense and ferociously difficult...Mr. Taylor played them all with incisive rhythm, lucid textures and, where the music allowed, alluring colors. Still, the sheer effort involved in playing these works was something to behold."
New York Times, November 2005
"Taylor's playing -- emotionally volatile yet scrupulously weighted and voiced -- worked hand-in-glove with McDuffie's."
Washington Post, November 2005
"...the blazing performance of Messiaen's ''Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus'' by Christopher Taylor in the Gardner Museum is likely to stand as a point of reference for many seasons to come." Boston Globe
"Throughout Mr. Taylor played with unflagging energy and an impressive ability to articulate and even swing those complex rhythms. There was a mesmerizing self-possession in these performances, as if a vigorous dialogue between pianist and composer were taking place entirely inside Mr. Taylor's head and simply finding expression in his fingers. The nature of the discussion was anyone's guess, but it was a pleasure to listen in."
The New York Times
"The young pianist Christopher Taylor is so talented it's almost frightening...Taylor revealed limpid, legato lines of plaintive beauty. His ear was alert to the fantasy and drama in this work."
The Boston Globe
"A stunning new recording of William Bolcom's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Twelve New Etudes" (1977-86) features Christopher Taylor... [The etudes] require a pianist of equally nimble intelligence and imagination - not to mention physical endurance -- and Taylor is more than up to the challenge." (CD review)
The New Yorker
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