Karen Bentley Pollick & Ivan Sokolov
Biography Karen Bentley Pollick & Ivan Sokolov
Karen Bentley Pollick
has performed as violinist with Paul Dresher’s Electro Acoustic Ensemble since 1999 and performs a wide range of solo repertoire and styles on violin, viola, piano and Norwegian hardangerfele. A native of Palo Alto, California, she studied with Camilla Wicks in San Francisco and with Yuval Yaron, Josef Gingold and Rostislav Dubinsky at Indiana University where she received both Bachelors and Masters of Music Degrees in Violin Performance. She has several recordings of original music, including Electric Diamond, Konzerto & Succubus, and Ariel View, for which she has received three music awards from Just Plain Folks, including Best Instrumental Album and Best Song. On her own record label Ariel Ventures she has produced Dancing Suite to Suite,
Pollick was concertmaster of the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1983 and 1984 and has participated in the June in Buffalo and Wellesley Composers Conferences. She has appeared as soloist with Redwood Symphony in the world premiere of Swedish composer Ole Saxe’s Dance Suite for violin and orchestra, the Alabama Symphony, and orchestras in Panama, Russia, Alaska, New York and California. She has performed in recital with Russian pianist/composer Ivan Sokolov at the American Academy of Rome, Seattle and New York City, throughout the Czech Republic with cellist Dennis Parker at the American Spring Festival, and in England at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Along with choreographer Teri Weksler and percussionist John Scalici, Pollick received a Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham 2008 Interdisciplinary Grant to Individual Artists. Pollick received a grant from the Alabama State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts for her March 2010 Solo Violin & Alternating Currents concerts in Birmingham, Seattle and at Music Olomouc 2011. She launched Violin, Viola & Video Virtuosity with New York video artist Sheri Wills in November 2012 in Brooklyn and Seattle. She has toured with the Paul Dresher Double Duo since 2009. Pollick performs on a violin made by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume in 1860 and a viola made in 1987 by William Whedbee.
Ivan Sokolov
a Russian pianist, composer, and educator, has established himself as a leading figure of the Russian music scene for over three decades. An insightful interpreter and dazzling performer of baroque, classical, and romantic repertoire, Sokolov is also an internationally acclaimed champion of new music and rarely heard works. His close collaborations with composers such as E. Denisov, S. Gubaidulina, N. Sidelnikov, A. Schnittke, G. Ustvolskaya, V. Silvestrov, A. Vustin, N. Korndorf, A. Raskatov, etc. have resulted in Sokolov’s numerous world premieres of their works, as well as in other major projects (e.g., recording the complete Piano Sonatas and Preludes by Ustvolskaya under the Triton label).
Sokolov is widely recognized as a groundbreaking artist who introduced Russian audiences to the Western European and American avant-garde composers K. Stockhausen, P. Boulez, G. Crumb, J. Cage, M. Feldman, etc. Furthermore, he was among the founders and major performers at the famous Alternativa new music festival held in Moscow at the start of the perestroika. Now, he regularly appears in other festivals including Moscow Autumn, December Nights, A. Sakharov International Art Festival, International Diaghilev Festival (Russia), Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival, Frankfurter Feste (Germany), Luezerner Festwoche (Switzerland), and Icebreaker (USA).
Sokolov has performed with distinguished artists such as pianists Martha Argerich and Alexei Lubimov, violinists Tatiana Grindenko, Daniel Hope, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, cellists Natalya Gutman and Alexander Ivashkin, and conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Alexander Lazarev, and Andrey Boreyko. He graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where his primary teachers were Lev Naumov (piano) and Nikolai Sidelnikov (composition).
Ivan Sokolov’s own music is performed in Russia and beyond. Possessing a striking ability to compose in different styles, he constantly searches for a unique stylistic approach that reveals the deepest semantic level of music. He has written one opera, two instrumental theater pieces, more than twenty chamber music works, over ten pieces for the percussion ensemble, about two hundred songs, and music for choir, vocal ensembles, piano, and other solo instruments.
As an educator, Ivan Sokolov is a faculty member of the Russian Gnesins Academy of Music and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. There he teaches a highly demanded course called Study of Musical Content, which is closely linked with his own intensive compositional work. Moreover, he teaches 20th and 21st century piano music at the Department of Historic and Contemporary Performance.
Ivan is a regular guest at the Moscow Radio broadcast programs. He has a number of music research publications.
