Josephine van Lier | |
---|---|
Background information | |
Genres | Classical |
Occupation(s) | Cellist |
Years active | 1992-present |
Labels | Independent |
Website | Official Website |
Josephine van Lier (born 1968, in the Netherlands) is a performing cellist specialized in both baroque and contemporary cello residing in Canada.
A versatile musician, Josephine van Lier is equally at ease on a baroque cello or a 5 string violoncello piccolo as on their contemporary counterparts, using instruments and bows whose designs, construction and material span over 400 years in origin; from the gut strings of her baroque cello to her 1870 cello and the space-age material of her carbon fiber cello. [1] She therefore covers a wide variety of repertoire utilizing the endless possibilities that this range of instruments, string set-ups and bows allow her. [2]
In 2010 she released a 4-CD set featuring all six suites for unaccompanied cello by Bach played on four different cellos. This unique recording sets side by side the different sounds of historic and new instruments and compares their strengths and weaknesses. [3]
Josephine van Lier appears on the concert stages in Canada, the United States and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician.
She is on faculty at Concordia University College of Alberta. [4]
Between 2005 and 2009 she served as president for the Alberta String Association. [5]
Josephine van Lier received degree in cello performance and pedagogy from the "Gronings Conservatorium" (now called Prince Claus Conservatoire) in 1992. [6] Since 1995 she has lived in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
She is the cellist of the Strathcona String Quartet. [7]
Ms. van Lier is a frequent recipient of grants and awards [8] [9] including the "Celebration of Women in the Arts Award of 2007" [10] from the Edmonton Arts Council. Her concerts as soloist and with the Strathcona String Quartet were noted as "Memorable live shows from 2009" [11]
Josephine regularly performs on four different instruments and with two different bows:
Albums
The cello ( CHEL-oh), properly violoncello ( VY-ə-lən-CHEL-oh, Italian pronunciation: [vjolonˈtʃɛllo]), is a bowed (sometimes plucked and occasionally hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually tuned in perfect fifths: from low to high, C2, G2, D3 and A3. The viola's four strings are each an octave higher. Music for the cello is generally written in the bass clef, with tenor clef, and treble clef used for higher-range passages.
The six Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012, are suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). They are some of the most frequently performed solo compositions ever written for cello. Bach most likely composed them during the period 1717–1723, when he served as Kapellmeister in Köthen. The title given on the cover of the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript was Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso.
Anner Bylsma was a Dutch cellist who played on both modern and period instruments in a historically informed style. He took an interest in music from an early age. He studied with Carel van Leeuwen Boomkamp at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and won the Prix d'excellence in 1957.
Frances-Marie Uitti is an American cellist and composer known for her use of extended techniques and performance of contemporary classical music. Tom Service, music critic for the Guardian newspaper, has called her "arguably the world's most influentially experimental cellist."
Mario Davidovsky was an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Pieter Wispelwey is a Dutch cellist. In 1992, he was the first cellist to receive the Netherlands Music Prize, a government-awarded prize given to the most promising young musician in the Netherlands. He has come to be regarded as one of the world's leading performers and interpreters of both baroque and modern cello works.
Lillian Fuchs was an American violist, teacher and composer. She is considered to be among the finest instrumentalists of her time. She came from a musical family, and her brothers, Joseph Fuchs, a violinist, and Harry Fuchs, a cellist, performed with her on various recordings.
Michael Blake is a South African contemporary classical music composer and performer. He studied in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was associated with conceptual art and the emergence of an indigenous experimental music aesthetic. In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998. From around 2000 African music becomes less explicit on the surface of his compositions, but elements of rhythm and repetition remain as part of a more postcolonial engagement with material and form. He works in a range of styles including minimalism and collage, and now also forages for source material from the entire musical canon.
Josetxu Obregón is a Spanish cellist, specializing in early music performance.
Liza Lim is an Australian composer. Lim writes concert music as well as music theatre and has collaborated with artists on a number of installation and video projects. Her work reflects her interests in Asian ritual culture, the aesthetics of Aboriginal art and shows the influence of non-Western music performance practice.
Kenneth Slowik is an American cellist, viol player, and conductor, Curator of Musical Instrument Collection at the National Museum of American History and Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society. He took an interest in music and organology from an early age. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, guided by Howard Mayer Brown, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, and Frederik Prausnitz.
David Pereira is an Australian classical cellist, considered one of the finest working today. He was Senior Lecturer in Cello at the Canberra School of Music from 1990 to 2008. Later he worked there as a Distinguished Artist in Residence. Since April 2017 he again teaches cello there as a Senior Lecturer.
Graham Waterhouse is an English composer and cellist who specializes in chamber music. He has composed a cello concerto, Three Pieces for Solo Cello and Variations for Cello Solo for his own instrument, and string quartets and compositions that juxtapose a quartet with a solo instrument, including Piccolo Quintet, Bassoon Quintet and the piano quintet Rhapsodie Macabre. He has set poetry for speaking voice and cello, such as Der Handschuh, and has written song cycles. His compositions reflect the individual capacity and character of players and instruments, from the piccolo to the contrabassoon.
Theo Verbey was a Dutch composer.
Jan Škrdlík is a Czech cellist, of the younger school of the Czech cello players, an artist, a writer and a teacher.
Michael Bach, also known as Michael Bach Bachtischa, is a German cellist, composer, and visual artist.
Sergei Istomin is a cellist and a viola da gamba player. He began his violoncello studies at the age of six at the Gnessin School for gifted children in Moscow, Russia, where he obtained his bachelor's degree. He completed his master's degree at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the class of Valentin Feigin and then later his post-graduate studies with Catharina Meints Caldwell at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and August Wenzinger at the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute (BPI). In 2018 he received his Doctor of Arts (Music) degree at the Ghent University, Belgium. His doctoral thesis "Variations on a Rococo theme, Op.33: Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Fitzenhagen: a creative collaboration. Moscow and Saint Petersburg violoncello schools in the light of European traditions: a historical and textological clarification" is in the field of historically informed performance practice and musicology.
Christophe Coin is a French cellist, viola da gamba player and conductor active in the field of historically informed performance. He is the cellist of the Quatuor Mosaïques and is the director of the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges.
Josef Luitz is an Austrian cellist and cello teacher. He was solo cellist of the NÖ Tonkünstlerorchester and is co-founder of the international chamber music festival Allegro Vivo.
Martin Ostertag is a German classical cellist and music educator.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Alberta String Association Newsletter, Page 3{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Strathcona String Quartet