Once again, the Westport Arts Center is embarking on an exciting, innovative chamber music series. Russell Platt, composer, senior editor for classical music at The New Yorker and curator for the Westport Arts Center, has brought back violinist and cellist Colin and Eric Jacobsen of the Brooklyn Rider Quartet for a concert on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. at the Westport Arts Gallery. The performance features duo works by George Frederic Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Zoltan Kodaly and a brand new Duo for Violin and Cello by Russell Platt.
Colin Jacobsen, a 2003 Avery Fisher Career Grant winner, has been in the public eye since the age of fourteen when he served as soloist in Bruch's Scottish Fantasy with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic. He returned to the New York Philharmonic in May 2006 with Brahms' Double Concerto with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. His other guest appearances with orchestras have included Albany, Charlotte, Chicago, Eugene, Rhode Island, Nashville, Charleston, the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He has been a champion of new music and has premiered Ellen Taafe Zwillich's Partita for Violin and String Orchestra. An unusual concerto collaboration occurred when he gave the premiere performance of a Kevin Beavers Violin Concerto; this work, which was based on William Kennedy’s novel, Roscoe, featured the author as narrator. He andhis brother, cellist Eric Jacobsen, founded the Knights, a flexible chamber orchestra that has played at such diverse events and venues as the Beethoven Festival at the Planting Fields Arboretum, the MATA contemporary music festival, Tonic, and Bargemusic. He is a member of the Brooklyn Rider Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the group at Bargemusic, and the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert.
Eric Jacobsen has appeared as soloist with the Chamber Soloists of Austin in Texas , the Riverside Orchestra, the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra, the Greenwich Village Orchestra, the Lake George Chamber Orchestra, the Woodstock Festival Orchestra, and the New York Repertory Orchestra. He has been heard on NPR programs such as Sound Check and Performance Today, where he performed in four live chamber music concerts last November. Besides his membership in the Brooklyn Rider Quartet, he is a member of Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. Last year he participated in residencies in Japan's National Museums in Nara and Fukuoka; his travels with the ensemble have taken him to Baku, Azerbaijan, Switzerland and Malaysia to perform for the Aga Khan. During the fall, he has participated in residencies at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in NY. One of his most prestigious appearances was in 2003 with Renee Fleming at the opening of Zankel Hall, at Carnegie Hall and on the Late Show with David Letterman.
