Four principal strings from the DSO form the Woodward String Quartet: Concertmaster Robyn Bollinger, Associate Concertmaster Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, Principal Viola Eric Nowlin, and Principal Cello Wei Yu
The same week on November 10: Into the Shadows: An Evening of Chamber Music presented by DSO and American Romanian Festival
Tickets on sale now at dso.org
Detroit, (October 30, 2024) – Four leaders of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra have come together in creative collaboration to form the Woodward String Quartet. The group will bring their signature chemistry and incisive playing to their Detroit debut on November 14 at 7 p.m. in the Peter D. and Julie F. Cummings Cube, located within the DSO’s home of the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center in Midtown Detroit.
The group is comprised of DSO Concertmaster (Katherine Tuck Chair) Robyn Bollinger, Associate Concertmaster (Schwartz and Shapero Family Chair) Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, Principal Viola (Julie and Ed Levy, Jr. Chair) Eric Nowlin, and Principal Cello Wei Yu. Outside of their work with the DSO, many orchestra musicians actively participate in music education, solo performance, and chamber music engagements, and the Woodward String Quartet is one such example of this involvement.
The November 14 program, titled “Eastward View,” opens with Joseph Haydn’s cheerful “Sunrise” Quartet and centers around Debussy’s masterful String Quartet, inspired by traditional Javanese gamelan instruments. The program also features String Quartet No. 1 by Grammy-nominated artist and fellow Michigander Zhou Tian.
The same week on November 10, the DSO will partner with the American Romanian Festival to bring chamber music to the War Memorial in Grosse Pointe with Into the Shadows: An Evening of Chamber Music. This William Davidson Neighborhood Chamber Recital, rescheduled from June 2024, centers on the subject of death and features Cornelia Tăutu’s Rota II for Violin and Cello, George Crumb’s Black Angels for Electric String Quartet, and Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden” performed by DSO musicians Hae Jeong Heidi Han (violin), Marian Tănău (violin), Will Haapaniemi (viola), and Jeremy Crosmer (cello).
Tickets for the November 14 performance start at $25 and can be purchased at dso.org or by calling the Box Office at 313.576.5111, open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets for the November 10 performance are free to all Neighborhood Series subscribers. Single tickets are also available and start at $15, or $10 for students.
Programming in the Peter D. & Julie F. Cummings Cube is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Peter and Julie Cummings. The Cube is the DSO’s black box performance space located within the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center at 3711 Woodward Avenue. The Cube is defined for the curated, urban, boundless experiences it delivers to audiences. The venue is designed to not only be accessible, but also relevant to communities the DSO serves through consciously curated arts programming that spans across musical and artistic genres.
The William Davidson Neighborhood Concert Series is made possible by a generous grant from theWilliam Davidson Foundation. WRCJ 90.9 FM also supports the series.
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Thursday, November 14 at 7 p.m.
The Cube
Robyn Bollinger, violin
Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, violin
Eric Nowlin, viola
Wei Yu, cello
Bringing their signature chemistry and incisive playing to chamber music, four principal strings from the DSO have joined forces to form the Woodward String Quartet. Concertmaster Robyn Bollinger, Associate Concertmaster Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, Principal Viola Eric Nowlin, and Principal Cello Wei Yu make their Detroit debut as a quartet with a program inspired by the East. “Eastward View” opens with Haydn’s cheerful “Sunrise” Quartet Op. 76 No. 4, and centers around Debussy’s masterful String Quartet, inspired by traditional Javanese gamelan instruments. The program also features String Quartet No. 1 by the Grammy-nominated, fellow Michigan artist Zhou Tian.
JOSEPH HAYDN “Sunrise” Quartet Op. 76 No. 4
CLAUDE DEBUSSY String Quartet
ZHOU TIAN String Quartet No. 1
Sunday, November 10 at 7 p.m.
The War Memorial (32 Lake Shore Rd, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI 48236)
Hae Jeong Heidi Han, violin
Marian Tănău, violin
Will Haapaniemi, viola
Jeremy Crosmer, cello
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra & The American Romanian Festival, celebrating its 20th-anniversary season, present an evening of works centered around the subject of death. The first work on the program, Rota II by Romanian composer Cornelia Tăutu, is a duet for violin and violoncello that opens slowly and austerely and evokes the contemplative nature of a long-forgotten ancestral melody. George Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War is expressed through his threnody Black Angels.
The work is structured around the numbers 13 and 7, numerals often related to fate and destiny, and several tonal musical quotations can be found throughout the piece, including snippets from the next work on the program: Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Written in 1824, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was the composer’s coming to terms with his long-term illness and impending death and has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.”
CORNELIA TĂUTU Rota II for Violin and Cello
GEORGE CRUMB Black Angels for Electric String Quartet
FRANZ SCHUBERT String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden”
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About Robyn Bollinger
Daring, versatile, and charismatic, American violinist Robyn Bollinger is the Concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Equally at home as soloist, chamber musician, orchestral leader, and pedagogue, Bollinger is an artist at the forefront of classical music. Having made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut at age 12, she regularly performs with orchestras across the United States. Past highlights include engagements with the Boston Pops and the symphony orchestras of Brevard, California, Charleston, Grand Tetons Music Festival, Helena, Illinois, Indian Hill, Knoxville, and Symphony in C. In 2019, Bollinger gave the world premiere of Artifacts, a four-movement violin concerto commissioned by the California Symphony by composer Katherine Balch and written specifically for Bollinger.
A sought-after collaborator and recitalist, Bollinger is a popular figure on chamber music stages around the world. She is a returning participant at the acclaimed Marlboro Music Festival and has been featured in numerous national tours with Musicians from Marlboro. She has toured in Midori’s Music Sharing International Community Engagement Program “ICEP” in Japan, performing in recital in Osaka’s Phoenix Hall, Tokyo’s Oji Hall, and Tokyo National Arts Center. A prizewinner at the 2007 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Bollinger has appeared at the chamber music festivals of Halcyon, Highlands-Cashiers, Lake Champlain, Monadnock, and Orcas Island. She has presented recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, National Sawdust, Emory University, Kalliroscope Gallery, Live from Indian Hill, the California Symphony, and more. She appears regularly with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble in Boston, the Boston Chamber Music Society, Mistral Music, Spruce Peak Chamber Music Society, and Glissando Music, among others.
Bollinger has been recognized for both her innovation and entrepreneurship. She received a prestigious Fellowship from the Lenore Annenberg Arts Fellowship Fund for her multimedia performance project, “CIACCONA: The Bass of Time,” later releasing a commercial CD and DVD of the project and presenting a national tour of the program. An examination of the history and legacy of the Bach’s famed chaconne for solo violin, the program received critical acclaim from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Bollinger has also been recognized with an Entrepreneurial Musicianship Grant from New England Conservatory for her ground-breaking “Project Paganini,” a performance project featuring the twenty-four Caprices of Paganini. She was recently awarded a historic Early-Career Musician Fellowship from Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, DC, to research and prepare her next multimedia project, “Encore! Just One More,” to be debuted in future seasons.
A noted leader and ensemble player, Bollinger has been a frequent Guest Concertmaster with the Pittsburgh Symphony and has made Guest Concertmaster appearances with the Indianapolis Symphony and St. Bart’s Music Festival Orchestra. She is a former member of A Far Cry, the Boston-based, democratically run chamber orchestra, and she has appeared on commercial recordings with both the Pittsburgh Symphony and A Far Cry, all of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.
Bollinger is a devoted educator, having presented masterclasses at the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Longy School of music, University of California Bakersfield, Temple University Preparatory School, and a unique masterclass examining classical music in the context of Aristotle at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. She is a former faculty member at New England Conservatory Preparatory School in Boston and Brandeis University. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees with academic honors from the New England Conservatory of Music. Her major teachers included Soovin Kim, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Paul Kantor, and Lyle Davidson. Bollinger currently plays on a 1697 G. B. Rogeri violin on generous loan from a private collector and a 2013 Benoit Rolland bow commissioned specially for her.
About Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy
Kimberly Ann Kaloyanides Kennedy won her coveted position as a violinist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at the age of 22. In 2003, Kennedy further realized her dream when she became Associate Concertmaster.
Kennedy began her study of the violin at the age of 5 in Dayton, OH. Being the daughter of a Minister of Music and church organist allowed her many chances to share from her heart in front of congregations. Her love of music became what undoubtedly would be her career as she pursued her studies at Brevard Music Center and Interlochen Arts Camp as the Governor’s Scholar for the state of Ohio. She continued her studies at the Sarasota Music Festival; spent four summers at the Aspen Music Festival on fellowship as Associate Concertmaster of the Chamber Orchestra; spent three years at the Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton, Florida with Sergiu Schwartz; and finally landed at the University of Michigan with Paul Kantor. It was halfway through her senior year at Michigan in 1998 that her hard work paid off, when she joined the first violin section of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Throughout her training, she won several prizes in competitions around the country, including the Grand Prize in the National MTNA competition and first prize in the Greek Women’s National Competition in Chicago; the Skokie Valley Concerto Competition, where she performed Barber's Violin Concerto; the University of Michigan Concerto Competition, where she performed Ravel’s Tzigane; and the Harid Conservatory Concerto Competition, where she performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Kennedy was one of the few Americans invited to the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis in 1998. She solos regularly with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Kennedy enjoys performing chamber music regularly around Michigan with various groups including the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings and on series such as Chamber Music North, Fairlane Concert Guild, Pro Mozart, Classical Brunch in Birmingham, and the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival.
Kennedy is passionate about serving others through her music, both at church and around the community. She loves teaching and sharing what God has put in her heart with her students. Kennedy and her husband Bryan Kennedy, fourth horn of the DSO, are strongly committed to this orchestra and to this region. They believe in the future of this great organization and intend to work diligently to ensure that it remains the internationally renowned and artistically revered Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
About Eric Nowlin
Violist Eric Nowlin has performed extensively throughout the United States as well as abroad. Nowlin's performance of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was described by Classical Source as "outstanding…his distinctive timbre and sovereign musicianship at one with Slatkin’s perfectly paced account…totally compelling."
Past accomplishments include receiving second prize in the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Competition, first prize in the Irving Klein International String Competition, first prize in the Hellam Young Artists Competition, grand prize in the Naftzger Young Artists Competition, and winner of the Juilliard Viola Concerto Competition. Performances have included solo engagements with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Springfield Symphony in Missouri, the Santa Cruz Symphony, the Peninsula Symphony, and the Kumamoto Symphony in Japan, as well as recitals in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, and Mexico.
Nowlin is the violist of the Juno and Opus Award-winning New Orford String Quartet. Other chamber music activities have included participating in festivals such as the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and the Steans Institute for Young Artists at Ravinia. He was a regular member of the Jupiter Chamber Players in New York City and toured with Musicians from Marlboro and Musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Institute. Nowlin was previously the Associate Principal Viola in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and has served as Guest Principal Viola with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Metropolis Ensemble, and Cleveland’s Citymusic, as well as substitute viola with the New York Philharmonic.
Nowlin is the Assistant Professor of Viola at Michigan State University and has previously been an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music as well as Instructor of Viola at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Ontario. He spends time during the summer months teaching and performing at numerous music festivals in the United States and Canada.
Nowlin received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School as a scholarship student of Samuel Rhodes. Nowlin plays on a 1757 J.B. Guadagnini viola on generous loan from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, as well as a viola from 1910 made by Giovanni Pistucci and a viola made by Sam Zygmuntowicz made in 2019.
About Wei Yu
Wei Yu was appointed Principal Cello of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra by Music Director Laureate Leonard Slatkin in 2014. He made his solo debut performing Dvořák's Cello Concerto and has appeared as soloist with the DSO every season since. Before joining the DSO, Yu was a member of the New York Philharmonic for seven seasons.
Yu was a prizewinner at the Hudson Valley Philharmonic String Competition, the Holland American Music Society Cello Competition, the Music Teachers National Association Competition (MTNA National Collegiate Strings), Canada’s National Music Festival, Calgary’s Kiwanis Festival, and China’s National Cello competitions.
An avid chamber musician, Yu has been invited to the Marlboro, Ravinia, Great Lakes Chamber Music, and Mainly Mozart music festivals. Wei has collaborated with musicians including cellist Carter Brey and David Soyer; pianists Richard Goode and Menahem Pressler; violinists Augustin Hadelich, Midori, and Pinchas Zukerman; and members of the Guarneri, Emerson, and Juilliard Quartets. As a member of the New York Philharmonic ensembles, he made regular appearances at Merkin Concert Hall.
A successful instructor, Yu serves as a faculty member at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. He has given cello masterclasses at universities and festivals in the United States, Canada, Poland, and China. During the summer, Yu teaches at the Morningside Music Bridge International Music Festival in Calgary, Canada; Carnegie Hall's National Youth Orchestra, and the Center Stage Strings Summer Institute at the University of Michigan.
Born in Shanghai, China, Yu began studying the cello at age four and made his concerto debut at age 11, performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. He received a Bachelor of Music from North Park University in Chicago and a Master of Music from The Juilliard School. His principal teachers include Mei-Juan Liu, John Kadz, Hans Jørgen Jensen, and David Soyer.
About the DSO
The acclaimed Detroit Symphony Orchestra is known for trailblazing performances, collaborations with the world’s foremost musical artists, and a deep connection to its city. Led by Music Director Jader Bignamini since 2020, the DSO makes its home at historic Orchestra Hall within the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center, offering a performance schedule that features the PVS Classical, PNC Pops, Paradise Jazz, and Young People’s Family Concert series. In addition, the DSO presents the William Davidson Neighborhood Concert Series in metro area venues, as well as eclectic multi-genre performances in its mid-size venue The Cube, constructed and curated with support from Peter D. & Julie F. Cummings. A dedication to broadcast innovation began in 1922, when the DSO became the first orchestra in the world to present a live radio broadcast of a concert and continues today with the groundbreaking Live from Orchestra Hall series of free webcasts.
Since its first school concerts a century ago, and particularly since the founding of the Civic Youth Ensembles in 1970, the DSO has been a national leader in bringing the benefits of music education to students, teachers, and families in Detroit and surrounding communities. The DSO remains committed to expanding its participation in the growth and well-being of Detroit through programs like its Detroit Neighborhood Initiative—cultural events co-created with community partners and residents—and Detroit Harmony, a promise to provide an instrument and instruction to any student in the city who wants to learn. With unwavering support from the people of Detroit, the DSO actively pursues a mission to impact lives through the power of unforgettable musical experiences.