Aaron Berofsky Violin Recital

Violinist, Aaron Berofsky performs in a guest faculty recital at the Howard Center. Berofsky is faculty at University of Michigan. His all- Beethoven recital will be accompanied by Philip Bush.

 

Berofsky will hold a Master Class for students on Friday, March 25 at 2:00 P.M. in Hamel Hall. This event is also open to the public.

 

Violinist Aaron Berofsky has toured extensively throughout the United States and abroad, gaining wide recognition as a soloist and chamber musician. As soloist, he has performed with orchestras in the United States, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada. He has performed the complete cycle of Mozart violin sonatas at the International Festival Deia in Spain and has appeared in such renowned venues as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Corocoran Gallery, Het Doelen, L'Octogone, the Teatro San Jose and the Museo de Bellas Artes. Mr. Berofsky has been featured on NPR's Performance Today and on the Canadian Broadcasting Company. His acclaimed recordings can be found on the Sony, Naxos, New Albion, ECM, Audio Ideas, Blue Griffin and Chesky labels.  Recent recital tours have taken him to Germany and Italy, and he was featured soloist on the 2009 NAXOS recording of music by Paul Fetler, performed by the Ann Arbor Symphony, including the debut recording of his Concerto No. 2.

 

Mr. Berofsky has been the first violinist of the Chester String Quartet since 1992. The quartet has been acclaimed as "one of the country's best young string quartets" by the Boston Globe. Tours have taken them throughout the Americas and Europe and the quartet members have collaborated with such artists as Robert Mann, Arnold Steinhardt, Franco Gulli, members of the Alban Berg quartet, Andres Diaz, Eugene Istomin and Ruth Laredo. Some notable projects over the years have included the complete cycles of the quartets by Beethoven and Dvorak, and numerous recordings by such composers as Mozart, Haydn, Barber, Porter, Piston, Kernis and Tenenbom. The Chester Quartet has served as resident quartet at the University of Michigan and at Indiana University South Bend.

 

An alumnus of the Juilliard School, Mr. Berofsky was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay. Other important teachers have included Robert Mann, Felix Galimir, Glenn Dicterow, Lorand Fenyves and Elaine Richey. Mr. Berofsky is known for his commitment to teaching and is Professor of Violin at the University of Michigan and visiting Professor at the Hochschule fur Muisk in Detmold, Germany. He taught at he Meadowmount School of Music for many summers and now teaches at the Chautauqua Institution. He has also taught at Oberlin, Interlochen, the Adriatic Chamber Music Festival and the Conservatorio Palma Mallorca.

 

Mr. Berofsky's interest in early music led him to perform with the acclaimed chamber orchestra Tafelmusik on period instruments, and he has recorded with them for the Sony label. He is co-director of the Baroque Chamber Orchestra at the University of Michigan, along with harpsichordist Edward Parmentier.  With a strong dedication to new music as well, he has worked extensively with many leading composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, performing, commissioning and recording music by John Cage, William Bolcom, Zhou Long, Michael Daugherty, Aaron Jay Kernis, Susan Botti, Morton Subotnick, Paul Fetler and Bright Sheng.

 

Aaron Berofsky is the concertmaster of the Ann Arbor Symphony. He has served as concertmaster for the Orkestra Sinfonica Bilbao, the Juilliard Orchestra and the Lansing Symphony as well. He performs frequently with the Camerata Adriatica as soloist and continues to appear regularly in recital and at festivals throughout North America and Europe.

 

 

Phillip Bush’s active and unconventional pianistic career has taken him to many parts of the globe. Since his New York recital debut at the Metropolitan Museum in 1984, Mr. Bush has appeared as recitalist throughout North America, as well as in Europe and Asia. In 2001 he made his Carnegie Hall concerto debut with the London Sinfonietta to critical acclaim, replacing an ailing Peter Serkin on short notice in concerti by Stravinsky and Alexander Goehr. He has also appeared as soloist with the Osaka Century Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Houston Symphony, and several other orchestras, in repertoire ranging from the Beethoven concerti to the American premiere of Michael Nyman’s Harpsichord Concerto. A much sought-after chamber musician, Mr. Bush has performed and recorded with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and appears frequently at numerous chamber music festivals from Sitka (Alaska)  to St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. He has also performed with the Kronos Quartet and the Miami String Quartet. Between 1991 and 1999 he performed over 250 concerts in Japan with the piano quartet "Typhoon," and recorded five CD's with the group for Epic/Sony, all of which reached the top of the Japanese classical charts. Since 2007 he has served as Music Director of the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East, a summer music program at Bennington College. 

 

A committed advocate for contemporary music, Phillip Bush has toured often with many renowned new music ensembles, including Bang on a Can All-Stars, Philip Glass Ensemble, and Steve Reich and Musicians. From 1995 until 2010 he was a member of the Milwaukee-based new music group, Present Music. Mr. Bush's efforts on behalf of contemporary music have earned him grants and awards from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Aaron Copland Fund, ASCAP, Chamber Music America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His discography as soloist and chamber musician has now surpassed thirty-five recordings, on labels such as Sony, Virgin Classics, Koch International, New World Records, Denon, and many others. Mr. Bush is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Leon Fleisher. From 2000 to 2004 Mr. Bush taught piano and chamber music at the University of Michigan and has also taught at the University of North Carolina. Since 2004 he has made his home in Columbia, South Carolina.