Violinist Katie Lansdale is widely acclaimed as soloist, chamber musician, and educator. She has performed as soloist and chamber artist in North/South America and Europe, and on numerous American concert series, including the Phillips Collection, the Caramoor Series, and Lincoln Center’s Rose Room. Winner of Grand Prizes at the Fischoff and Yellow Springs national chamber competitions, Lansdale has collaborated in chamber concerts with artists such as Yo Yo Ma, Felix Galimir, Donald Weilerstein, the Miami Quartet, Robert MacDonald, and Charles Neidich. Lansdale's concerto appearances have included with the National Symphony, the Austin Mozart Orchestra, the Schroeder Classical Orchestra, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and the NY Spectrum Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony and the New York Repertory Orchestra. In New York, where she founded the acclaimed Locrian new music group, Lansdale’s extensive chamber music concerts have ranged from Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center with Yo Yo Ma to Merkin Hall with the Twentieth Centuryists; she now performs twice a year in Carnegie Hall's Weill Hall with the Festival Chamber Society. Particularly widely acclaimed for performances of solo Bach, Lansdale has performed the complete cycle over a dozen times in North and South America. “This is one of the best recordings of this music,” wrote the American Record Guide of her Bach CD. Having presented solo Bach at Juilliard's Delay Symposium in 2013, Lansdale directs the Promisek Bach workshop program triennially in Bridgewater, CT.
Lansdale studied with Josef Gingold, Felix Galimir, Ronda Cole, Donald Weilerstein and Mitchell Stern. She graduated cum laude from Yale, where she was awarded prizes in both the arts and humanities, and earned graduate music degrees (M.M., D.M.A.) at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Manhattan School of Music. She has served on numerous summer festival faculties, including Kneisel Hall Chamber Festival, the Amalfi Coast Chamber Festival, Aria International Music Festival, and Music from Salem. Having taught at Boston University and at State University of New York-Stony Brook, she now teaches at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford and at Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Performances by Cellist Darrett Adkins have been called “heroic,” “stunning,” “intensely involving” (NY Times) and “fiery” (Boston Globe). This “adventurous champion of contemporary music” (Strings Magazine) has been the dedicatee of cello concertos by Su Lian Tan and Philip Cashian (both appear with Wernick’s concerto on his three-concerto CD Myth and Tradition) as well as Jeffrey Mumford. He gave the first New York performance and the first recording (on Naxos records) of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XIV, the first American Performance of Donatoni’s concerto “un ruisseau sur l’escalier” with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, The New York premiers of Concertos by Messiaen (Carnegie Hall), Nordheim (Alice Tully Hall) and Wallin (Zankel Hall), as well as the world premieres of concertos by Stephen Hartke (with Robert Spano) and Andrew Mead.. During his tenure with the Flux Quartet, among many creative firsts, he gave the first complete performance (and subsequent recording on Mode records) of Morton Feldman’s monumental String Quartet 2, lasting 6 continuous hours. His Aspen debut was with James Conlon conducting Boulez’s “Messagesquisse” on just 3 days’ notice. No stranger to the standard repertoire, Darrett Adkins has performed concertos with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, The Aspen Philharmonic, the Tokyo Philharmonic, Cleveland’s Red, Seoul’s Prime Orchestra and the Suwon Philharmonic (in the Seoul Arts Center), the Orchestre National de UFF in Rio De Janiero, Brazil, and the North Carolina and New Hampshire symphonies, among others. He was a guest of the Juilliard String Quartet on their Sony Masterworks recording of Jay Greenberg’s String Quintet, and subsequently gave the first performance with the Chiara Quartet. His solo CD Hypersuite2 is available on Oberlin Music, and his recording of duos by Ravel, Kodaly and Sessions, on Engine Company Records was an Amazon top 10 classical CD. Darrett Adkins serves on the cello and chamber music faculties of the Juilliard School, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the Aspen Music Festival and School.
Florence Millet, of Franco-German descent, performs with orchestra, in recitals and ensembles in venues across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Conductors she worked with are Charles Dutoit, Pascal vert, Simon Blech, Heinz Holier, Julia Jones, Elena Schwarz, Jonathan Darlington, David Marlow.
She is a founding member of the Lions Gate Trio, since 1988. Residencies include Tanglewood Festival, Universities of North-Carolina-Greensboro, Yale, W. Hartford and the Fairfield Library, CT.
A Professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, she was Chair of the Piano Department until 2021, then was elected Executive Director of the Wuppertal Campus.
She has worked closely with main voices in composition: Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, George Crumb, Johannes Schöllhorn, Jörg Widman, Hans Werner Henze, Hans Abrahamsen. She played with the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez and David Robertson from 1992-2000.
Her recordings for the labels Centaur, Sony, Triton and Erato were praised on both sides of the Atlantic. Soon to be released are CDs with horn trios by Ligeti, Abrahamsen, Koechlin and Cage, the World Premiere of the piano concerto op.31 by Adolph Busch, along with his Solo and Duo piano music, Morton Feldmann’s Piano and string Quartet (with the Jack Quartet) and a thematic solo recording including Bach, Janacek, Kurtag, Aperghis, Kapralova, Rihm etc.
A graduate of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Millet received her Masters and Doctoral Degrees at State University of New York at Stony Brook where she studied under Gilbert Kalish. Her other mentors were Leon Fleisher, Paul Badura Skoda, Peter Serkin and Jean Hubeau.
Florence Millet is artistic adviser for the Lichterfeld Foundation, promoting tolerance, intercultural understanding and creator of the Echospore.de platform which propagates music from persecuted composers.
She explores multidisciplinary concert formats with actors, choreography and dance (Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal) and Arts at the Tony Cragg Foundation, Van der Heydt Museum, Phillipps Collection or in lecture recitals.