Michael Torke: Spoon Bread Tessa Lark & Roman Rabinovich

• Michael Torke (b.1961): Spoon Bread:
• 1 Spoon Bread: I. Cornmeal 07:01
• 2 Spoon Bread: II. Milk 05:22
• 3 Spoon Bread: III. Eggs 04:45
• Total Runtime 17:08

Info for Michael Torke: Spoon Bread

Spoon Bread draws from the rich tradition of music found in Kentucky for its inspiration just as the violinist, Tessa Lark, for whom it was written, comes from that state, and enriches her classical playing with a bluegrass tradition.

Winner of the prestigious Naumburg International Violin Competition, Tessa Lark is a standout soloist and chamber musician. At age 16, she performed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and has gone on to appear with such renowned musicians as Itzhak Perlman, Pamela Frank, Kim Kashkashian, and others. Lark comes to Carnegie Hall for a recital that promises virtuosity and outstanding musicianship.

Tessa Lark, violin
Roman Rabinovich, piano

Tessa Lark
Silver Medalist in the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, recipient of a 2018 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and winner of the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition, is one of the most captivating artistic voices of our time. She has consistently been praised by critics and audiences for her astounding range of sounds, technical agility, and musical elegance. A budding superstar in the classical realm, she is also a highly acclaimed fiddler in the tradition of her native Kentucky, delighting audiences with programming that includes Appalachian and bluegrass music and inspiring composers to write for her.

Ms. Lark has been a featured soloist at numerous U.S. orchestras since making her concerto debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen. She performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2017 on Carnegie's Distinctive Debuts series, and again the following year as part of APAP's Young Performers Career Advancement showcase. Ms. Lark has appeared at such venues as Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the Artist Recital Series at Oberlin College, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Perlman Music Program, San Francisco Performances, Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Ravinia’s Bennett-Gordon Classics series, Troy Chromatic Concerts, Chamber Music Tulsa, Caramoor's Wednesday Morning Concerts, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, and the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, Olympic, and Music@Menlo festivals.

Her 2018-19 season includes debut appearances with the Seattle Symphony, where she will partner with cellist Jay Campbell in the Brahms Double Concerto, and with the Albany (NY) Symphony Orchestra in concerts featuring the world premiere of a bluegrass-inspired violin concerto written for her by Michael Torke. Also planned for 2018-19 is Ms. Lark’s debut CD, a fantasy-themed release exploring that musical form from the Baroque era to today; works include fantasias by Telemann, the Fantasie in C Major by Schubert, Ravel's Tzigane, the Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta by Fritz Kreisler, and Ms. Lark's own Appalachian Fantasy. The album's producer is four-time Grammy winner Judith Sherman.

Other season highlights will include appearances with the Louisville Orchestra, the Evansville, Binghamton and South Carolina philharmonics, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, CityMusic Cleveland, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, the Knoxville, Eastern Connecticut, Ridgefield and Williamsburg symphony orchestras, Moab Music Festival, and the Louisville, Maryland and Telluride chamber music societies, as well as recitals at Kaufman Music Center and Baruch College in New York and the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, MD.

A passionate chamber musician, she has toured with musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute and Musicians from Marlboro. Her piano trio, Trio Modêtre, took top prize in the 2012 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Ms. Lark has collaborated with such renowned artists as Mitsuko Uchida, Itzhak Perlman, Miriam Fried, Donald Weilerstein, Pamela Frank, Kim Kashkashian, Peter Wiley, and Ralph Kirshbaum. She joined Caramoor Virtuosi as a result of her participation in Caramoor's Rising Stars Series.

Keeping in touch with her Kentucky roots, Ms. Lark performs and programs bluegrass and Appalachian music regularly and collaborated with Mark O'Connor on his CD "MOC4," released in June 2014. She also plays jazz violin, most recently performing with the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York City. She premiered her own Appalachian Fantasy as part of her Distinctive Debuts recital at Carnegie Hall, where she also gave the world premiere of Michael Torke’s Spoon Bread, written specifically for her stylistic capabilities.

In addition to her busy performance schedule, Ms. Lark has served on the faculty of the Great Wall International Music Academy in Beijing, and as an alumna of NPR’s From the Top she is active in that radio show’s arts leadership program as a performer and educator. Ms. Lark’s primary mentors include Cathy McGlasson, Kurt Sassmannshaus, Miriam Fried, and Lucy Chapman. She is a graduate of New England Conservatory and completed her Artist Diploma at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Sylvia Rosenberg, Ida Kavafian, and Daniel Phillips.

Roman Rabinovich
Praised by The New York Times for his “uncommon sensitivity and feeling”, the eloquent young pianist Roman Rabinovich is the winner of the 12th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition. He has performed throughout Europe and the USA in such prestigious venues as Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Millennium Stage at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Dubbed “a true polymath, in the Renaissance sense of the word” (Seen & Heard International, 2016), Rabinovich is also a composer and visual artist. Rabinovich often includes his own compositions in his recital programs. In summer of 2016 he embarked upon the Haydn Project, encompassing recitals of Haydn’s complete keyboard sonatas at the Bath Festival in UK and partial cycles at the Lammermuir Festival in Scotland and ChamberFest Cleveland, as well as artwork inspired by Haydn. After his recent debut recital in Lincoln Center the New York Times hailed Mr. Rabinovich's Haydn Sonatas as "admirable interpretations, performed with a rich, full-blooded sound, singing lines and witty dexterity."

Lauded as “a master of tone-color” (International Piano, 2018) Rabinovich was the first of three young pianists to be championed by András Schiff, who selected him for his Building Bridges series in Zurich’s Tonhalle, Berlin, Ruhr Piano Festival, and New York’s SubCulture. Last season’s highlights included Mendelssohn Concerto No. 1 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Roger Norrington, Rachmaninov Concerto No. 3 with the KBS Orchestra and Yoel Levi, Brahms Concerto No. 1 with the Szczecin Philharmonic, Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto with Israel Symphony, Prokofiev No. 3 with Des Moines Symphony, Bernstein ‘The Age of Anxiety’ with Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, Bartok Concerto No.2 with the Dohnanyi Symphony in Budapest. Hid recital engagements included the Washington Performing Arts Society, Vancouver Recital Society, the Houston Society for the Performing Arts, the Philip Lorenz Memorial Piano Series, Chopin Society in St Paul, MN, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully and Walter Reade Theatre and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff. In spring 2014 Mr. Rabinovich has toured with the Haifa Symphony throughout the United States, performing as soloist with 4 different piano concertos in 30 concerts.

Rabinovich began drawing aged 10, and though he never took formal lessons it has been a passion of his ever since. Since 2010 he has created art on his iPhone and iPad, which are much easier to transport when traveling internationally for concerts. Technology is frequently also a feature of his concerts, as he performs from iPad rather than sheet music.

Rabinovich, "whose mature, self-assured playing belies his chronological age” (San Fransisco Classical Voice) made his Israel Philharmonic debut under Zubin Mehta aged just 10, having immigrated to Israel a year before from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Rabinovich’s parents are piano teachers and his earliest lessons were with them, before studying with Arie Vardi in Israel. He then attended the Curtis Institute of Music as a student of Seymour Lipkin and achieved his Masters Degree at the Juilliard School, where he was taught by Robert McDonald.

Rabinovich is releasing vol. 1 of the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas on First Hand Records in the fall of 2018. He recently recorded ballets by Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky for the Orchid Classics label to critical acclaim.

Michael Torke
The music of Michael Torke has been called "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years" (Gramophone). Hailed as a "vitally inventive composer" (Financial Times) and "a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation" (New York Times), Torke has created a substantial body of works in virtually every genre.

Career highlights include: Color Music (1985–89), a series of orchestral pieces that each explore a single, specific color; Javelin, recorded both for Argo and for John William’s Summon the Heroes, the official 1996 Olympics album; Four Seasons, an oratorio commissioned by the Walt Disney Company to celebrate the millennium; Strawberry Fields, whose “Great Performances” broadcast was nominated for an Emmy Award; and two evening-length story ballets, The Contract, and An Italian Straw Hat, for James Kudelka and the National Ballet of Canada.

In 1998 Torke was Composer in Residence for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, for which he wrote and recorded Rapture, his percussion concerto, and An American Abroad, a tone poem.

In 2003 Torke founded Ecstatic Records and re-issued the Decca/Argo catalog of his works. Recent recordings include Blue Pacific, Tahiti, Miami Grands, Concerto for Orchestra, and the upcoming Unconquered, featuring The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Three Manhattan Bridges, along with Winter's Tale—new concertos for piano and cello respectively—was released by Albany Records featuring Joyce Yang and Julie Albers as soloists, led by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony.

Upcoming projects include a recording of wind concertos alongside a bluegrass concerto for violinist Tessa Lark, and the continuing development of SENNA, an opera about the Formula-1 racing legend.

This album contains no booklet.