La cétoine qui dort dans le cœur de la rose: Dan Barrett plays solo & chamber works of Dominique Lemaître

Dan Barrett

Dan Barrett is a New York based cellist whose playing has been described as “Fire and ice,” by The New York Times, and who has been cited as “a brilliant and driven cellist, composer, and conductor,” by HuffPost. His extraordinary playing has been featured on a number of award-winning and critically hailed movie and documentary soundtracks such as the classic Ric Burns’ documentaries Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, Andy Warhol, New York, and The Civil War. He is featured in the Barry Levinson BBC series Copper, on Stephen King’s Night Flier soundtrack on RCA, and on many other recordings. Barrett’s performance credits as a soloist include Radio France Festival, The Gulbenkian Festival (Lisbon), Musique à Varengeville-sur-Mer (Normandy, France), Festival Presences (Paris), Accademia d’Estate Internazionale Lucca, Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and as recitalist on New York’s premiere classical station WQXR. Other credits as a cellist include an onstage run in James Joyce’s The Dead on Broadway, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York City Opera, American Ballet Theatre, Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Sirius Quartet, and principal positions for the STX Ensemble, Strathmere Chamber Orchestra, Connecticut Grand Opera, SEM Ensemble and the Crosstown Ensemble. Additionally, Barrett maintains an active career as a composer and conductor as well. He is creator and director of the International Street Cannibals (“a brash new-music ensemble,” The New York Times), an experimental New York ensemble that has done multiple educational and interactive projects.

Dominique Lemaître

French composer Dominique Lemaître (b. 1953) studied literature and musicology at the University of Rouen. He started his training in electroacoustic music by collaborating with the studio of Vierzon, after meeting Nicolas Frize, and studied composition with Jacques Petit at the Rouen Conservatory. He also attended Master classes with Kalus Huber and Maurice Ohana. His catalogue features more than one hundred works, displaying great diversity and ranging from instrumental and vocal works to string quartets, and from orchestral and ensemble works to collaborations with artists and poets.

Performed in more than thirty countries including China, the U.S., Italy, Japan, Russia and in Latin America, his compositions have been performed by a wide range of orchestras and ensembles such as the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Rouen, the orchestras of Picardie and Auvergne, the Orchestre philharmonique de Nice, the Colonne and Les Siècles orchestras, the Symphonic Orchestra of Bulgaria’s National Radio, the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, and the Oberlin Percussion Group, among others. Lemaître was honored with commissions from the Ministère de la culture, Radio France, the European Union, the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Rouen, the Orchestre de Picardie, the Orchestre d'Auvergne, the festival Automne in Normandy, the Musique Nouvelles en Liberté and many other festivals and ensembles. In 2018, the French actor Armel Veilhan (narrator) and the Orchestre de l’opéra de Rouen/Normandie under the direction of Patrick Hahn gave the premiere of Le grand silence, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of the end of World War I.

After a first monographic CD recorded at Ircam en 1995, his album Litanie du soleil (2002) received a “coup de Coeur” by the Academy of Charles Cros. Other recordings include a compilation of four works performed by Noëmi Schindler, Gary Hoffman, the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, L’Octuor de Violoncelles and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice under the direction of Daniel Kawka in 2005; Le Diapason de satin, recorded by Isabel Soccoja, Alain Celo and the ensemble Stravinsky and selected for the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs 2013; Et le soleil comme désir (2013) recorded by the Atelier Musical de Touraine; Pulsars (2015), devoted to Lemaître’s flute compositions and performed by François Veilhan and the ensemble Campsis; and Quatuors à cordes, String quartets (2019), recorded by the Quatuor Stanislas and soprano Kaoli Isshiki and awarded the Prix de l’Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen 2019.

Lemaître was invited as a composer-in-residence by the Conservatoire National de Région de Rouen and the region Haute-Normandie (2001- 2002), by Oberlin College in Ohio (U.S.) (2004), by the Ensemble Stravinsky in Metz (2010), by the Atelier Musical de Touraine in Tours (2012), and by the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design of Havre and Rouen (2012-2013).

Dominique Lemaître’s work is published by Éditions Musicales Rubin, Jobert, Lemoine and Universal Music Publishing Classical (Durand- Salabert-Eschig).

Michiyo Suzuki

A native of Japan, Michiyo Suzuki began her musical studies with piano at age three, violin at age six and clarinet at age thirteen. As a recitalist and chamber musician, Ms. Suzuki has performed extensively in her native country as well as in Europe and the United States. She studied with Charles Neidich at Purchase College Conservatory where she received her MFA degree and at SUNY Stony Brook in the DMA Program. In 1996 she made her New York Debut at Carnegie Recital Hall as an award winner from Artist's International and has been heard with increasing frequency in New York particularly in contemporary repertoire. Ms. Suzuki is a member of ST-X Xenakis Ensemble USA and Absolute Ensemble, and can be heard on "Xenakis Live In New York"and "Iannisimmo" from Vandenburg, and "Absolute Ensemble" and "Absolute Mix" from CCn'C.

Taka Kigawa

Taka Kigawa is a critically acclaimed pianist who has earned outstanding international recognition as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber music artist, performing extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Kigawa was awarded First Prize from the prestigious 1990 Japan Music Foundation Piano Competition in Tokyo and the Diploma Prize from Spain’s 1998 Concurs Internacional de Música Maria Canals Barcelona. His 2010 New York City recital was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best concerts of that year. Possessing an extremely large and varied repertoire, ranging from the Baroque to the avant-garde, he has collaborated closely with Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung and Jonathan Nott.

Nikita Yermak

Nikita Yermak is a composer, producer, and violinist/violist whose work has been heard on Warner Classics, CBS, NBC, Naxos, and Albany Records, with concerts in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, John F. Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA, with performances with Maxim Vengerov, Ólafur Arnalds, Michel Legrand, Alan Gilbert, Gerard Schwarz, Kent Nagano, Gil Shaham, and Leila Josefowicz, among others. In 2019, with composer, producer and pianist Danica Borisavljević, Yermak co-founded Vessels to Motherland, an electroacoustic and media composer duo. His latest solo recording project is titled TQ+: Works for Solo Violin/Viola/+ by Trans/Queer/+ Composers, to be released in Fall 2026.

Jed Distler

Composer/pianist Jed Distler studied with Andrew Thomas, Stanley Lock and William Komaiko and taught for more than 20 years at Sarah Lawrence College. Early in his career, Distler gained acclaim for his transcriptions of jazz piano solos by Art Tatum and Bill Evans, while his new music piano recitals have offered premieres of works by Virgil Thomson, Richard Rodney Bennett, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Lois V Vierk, William Schimmel and many others. Distler’s presenting organization ComposersCollaborative, Inc. earned a 2013 Guinness Record for the world’s largest keyboard ensemble, featuring a composition of his scored for 175 electronic keyboards. A Steinway Artist, Distler records for the high resolution Spirio player piano and is featured on an upcoming Steinway & Sons CD release, Cole Porter on a Steinway Volume 1. The TNC label recently released Distler’s solo piano CD Fearless Monk.

As Artist-in-Residence at WWFM’s The Classical Network, Distler is the creator, host and producer of Between the Keys, a weekly program that won the 2017 ASCAP Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award for excellence in broadcasting. Distler gained notoriety helping to uncover a scandal of hundreds of recordings fraudulently attributed to pianist Joyce Hatto and was featured in a BBC television documentary on the subject. Distler contributes reviews and articles to Gramophone and Classicstoday.com and is the author of numerous CD booklet notes. His music is available on the Sony, Point, Nonesuch, CRI, New World, Bridge, Steinway & Sons, Musical Concepts and TNC Music labels.

Suliman Tekalli

Suliman Tekalli is a Turkish-American violinist who received the top prize in the 2015 Seoul International Music Competition, and is currently the concertmaster of the Indiana Chamber Orchestra. He has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, throughout the Americas, Europe, Canada and Asia as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. Tekalli has appeared at numerous chamber music festivals, including Music@Menlo, Yellow Barn, and the Banff Centre, and also served as concertmaster of the critically acclaimed conductorless ensembles Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and the International Sejong Soloists. He regularly tours internationally as a recitalist with his sibling pianist Jamila Tekalli as the Tekalli Duo.