ARTIST PROFILE

Colin Carr and Lee Luvisi

BIOGRAPHY

Colin Carr has appeared throughout the world as soloist, chamber musician, recording artist and teacher.

As a concerto soloist, Colin Carr has played with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, The Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic and the orchestras of Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia and Montreal. He is a regular guest at the BBC Proms, he has twice toured Australia and has recently played concertos in South Korea, Hong Kong and New Zealand. Last year he returned to the Philharmonia in London and made his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Mark Elder. This year he toured with Mr Elder and the Halle Orchestra playing Dvorak, Elgar and Walton Concertos. Other highlights included a performance of Dvorak Concerto to close the Prague Autumn Festival and Beethoven Triple Concerto with Sir Colin Davis conducting at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Recitals have taken him to major cities each season: he regularly performs in London, New York and Boston. As a member of the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio he recorded and toured extensively for twenty years and recently formed the new group Sequenza. He is a frequent visitor to international chamber music festivals worldwide and has appeared often as a guest with the Guarneri and Emerson string quartets and at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York.

His solo recording of the unaccompanied cello works of Kodaly, Britten, Crumb and Schuller received an industry award in the US. The "Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello" performed live at Boston's Jordan Hall (GM Recordings) have been highly acclaimed and the Brahms Sonatas (Arabesque) were released in November 2000. He was also the soloist in Elgar's Cello Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic on a BBC Music Magazine cover CD.

Colin Carr is the winner of many prestigious international awards, includingFirst Prize in the Naumburg Competition, the Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Award and Second Prize in the Rostropovich International Cello Competition.

He first played the cello at the age of five; three years later he went to the Yehudi Menuhin School, where he studied with Maurice Gendron and later William Pleeth. He was made a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in 1998 having been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston for 16 years; in 1998 St. John's College, Oxford created the post of "Musician in Residence" for him and in September 2002 he became a professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

Mr. Carr plays on a Matteo Gofriller cello made in Venice in 1730.

 

Lee Luvisi was born on December 12, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky. His principal studies there were with Dwight Anderson, a pupil of Isidore Philipp. At 14, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he became a student of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Upon his graduation there in 1957 he was appointed to the major piano faculty.

Luvisi made his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 1957, followed two years later by his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic. In 1960, he was a bronze medalist in the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition in Brussels.

In 1959, Luvisi married Nina Hussey. Their son, Brian, was born the following year. Luvisi moved with his family back to Louisville in 1963 when he was invited to become Artist in Residence at the University of Louisville School of Music, a position he held until his retirement in 2001.

Luvisi's performance activities through the years have included a formidable array of engagements across all of the fifty states, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Australia and Europe. He has been soloist with nearly every important orchestra in North America and under such distinguished conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, William Steinberg, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Sir Neville Marriner and Robert Shaw. His brief European career in the late 60s and early 70s saw numerous highly-acclaimed appearances in London, Vienna, Berlin and other major capitals.

As a chamber pianist, Luvisi has collaborated with many of the world's foremost musicians and ensembles. Included amongst these have been the Juilliard, Guarneri, Cleveland and Emerson Quartets, and eminent artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Alexander Schneider, Leonard Rose, Richard Stoltzman, Jan DeGaetani, Frederica von Stade, Benita Valente and Dawn Upshaw to name a few. For two decades, until 2003, he was an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Luvisi has participated in the Marlboro, Aspen, Casals, Mostly Mozart, Chamber Music Northwest, Chautauqua and Tanglewood summer festivals, among many others. He can be heard on the Delos, Bridge, Arabesque and Louisville Orchestra First Edition recording labels.