Tessa Lark | |
|---|---|
 Lark in 2024 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | Richmond, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Occupation | Concert violinist |
| Instruments | Violin |
Tessa Lark is an American concert violinist.
Tessa Lark | |
|---|---|
| Lark in 2024 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | Richmond, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Occupation | Concert violinist |
| Instruments | Violin |
Tessa Lark is an American concert violinist.
Lark was born and raised in Richmond, Kentucky. She started violin training at age six through the Suzuki method. Her musical career began performing and recording with her father's Gospel Bluegrass band, Narrow Road. [1] She made her concerto debut at age 16 playing Mozart's Violin Concerto Number 3 in G major with the Cincinnati Symphony. [2] Lark was accepted into Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music's Starling Preparatory Strings Project where she studied privately with Kurt Sassmannshaus. [3]
At age 16, Lark was accepted into The New England Conservatory (NEC), where she completed her Bachelor and master's degrees. Lark also studied at The Juilliard School and studied in their Artist Diploma program until completion in 2017. Her private instructors at NEC were Miriam Fried and Lucy Chapman; at Juilliard, she studied with Sylvia Rosenberg, Ida Kavafian and Daniel Phillips. [4]
Lark has been a featured soloist with U.S. orchestras including the Buffalo [5] and Binghamton Philharmonics; the Cincinnati, Albany, Indianapolis, Longwood, New Haven, Hawaii, Santa Fe, Cheyenne, Santa Cruz, and Peninsula symphony orchestras; the Louisville Orchestra; CityMusic Cleveland; the New Juilliard Ensemble Chamber Orchestras; and internationally with the Chinese Opera and Ballet Symphony. [6] In 2016, Lark commissioned composer Michael Thurber to write her the violin concerto "Love Letter", which was premiered by the Carmel Symphony Orchestra in February 2018. [7] [8] Also in 2016, she commissioned Michael Torke through the Distinctive Debuts recital at Carnegie Hall to write "Spoon Bread", a sonata for violin and piano. [9] She premiered it in 2017 at Weill Hall with pianist Roman Rabinovich. [10]
In 2018, Torke wrote the violin concerto "Sky" for Lark, which she premiered with the Albany Symphony Orchestra in January 2019. [9] She was nominated for a 2020 Grammy Award in the "Best Classical Instrument Solo" category for the recording.
In 2017, Lark gave a solo recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall as part of Carnegie's Distinctive Debuts series. [11] Lark has also given recitals at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Perlman Music Program, San Francisco Performances, Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Ravinia's Bennett-Gordon Classics series, Troy Chromatic Concerts, Chamber Music Tulsa, Caramoor's Wednesday Morning Concerts, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Marlboro music festival. [11]
Lark has toured with musicians from Ravinia's Steans Music Institute and with Musicians from Marlboro. She has performed at the Seattle Chamber Music Society and her piano trio, Namirovsky-Lark-Pae, won the 2012 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. [12] She is also a member of the Caramoor Virtuosi. [13]
In 2014, she was featured on Mark O'Connor's album MOC4. [14]
In 2018, Lark received a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. [15] In 2016, she received an Avery Fisher Career Grant. [16] In 2014, she received a career grant from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts. [17] She was the silver medalist in the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis (IVCI), [18] and winner of the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition. [11]
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Sarah Chang is a Korean American classical violinist. Recognized as a child prodigy, she first played as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1989. She enrolled at Juilliard School to study music, graduated in 1999, and continued university studies. Especially during the 1990s and early to mid-2000s, Chang had major roles as a soloist with many of the world's major orchestras.
Robert Nathaniel Mann was a violinist, composer, conductor, and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, the first violinist at Juilliard, served on the school's string quartet for over fifty years until his retirement in 1997.
Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Austrian-American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist.
The Albany Symphony Orchestra is a professional symphony orchestra based in Albany, New York.
Jennifer Stumm is a concert violist, professor of viola at the University of Music and Arts of the City of Vienna and director of the Ilumina Festival in São Paulo.
Sirena Huang is an American concert violinist. She has received numerous awards, including First Prize at the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, First Prize at the Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition, First Place at the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, and Third Place at the Singapore International Violin Competition and the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition. She has performed with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. Huang was appointed as the first Artist-in-Residence of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in 2011.
Augustin Hadelich is an Italian-German-American Grammy-winning classical violinist.
Madeleine Louise Mitchell MMus, ARCM, GRSM, FRSA is a British violinist who has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in over forty countries. She has a wide repertoire and is particularly known for commissioning and premiering new works and for promoting British music in concert and on disc.
Viviane Hagner is a German violinist. She was born in Munich, Germany in 1977, to a German father and Korean mother. She is sister to Nicole Hagner, the pianist.
Giora Schmidt is an American/Israeli violinist.
Veronika Eberle is a German violinist.
Stephanie Ann Chase is an American classical violinist.
Stefan Jackiw is an American classical violinist.
Orion Weiss is an American classical pianist.
Kati Ilona Agócs is a Canadian-American composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Vilde Frang Bjærke is a Norwegian classical violinist.
Geneva Lewis is a New Zealand-born violinist now living in the United States.
The Lark Quartet was a New York-based, all female string quartet that operated from 1985 to 2019. It is acknowledged for its distinguished contribution to the string quartet repertoire, commissioning new works from some of America's most celebrated composers. Most notably, Aaron Jay Kernis' two string quartets: Quartet no. 1 Musica celestis and Quartet no. 2 Musica instrumentalis, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. The Lark Quartet served as Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2004 to 2008 and has recorded numerous albums on multiple labels including Decca/Argo, Arabesque, Bridge, ERI, Endeavor and Koch.
Anna Ji-eun Lee, known professionally as Anna Lee, is an American concert violinist of Korean descent. She made her professional orchestral debut at the age of 6 with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.