Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Presents New Work by Edgar Meyer at LAfayette Feb. 8

Six of New York’s finest musicians, known as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, will present a concert 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, at Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts. The program features violinist Cho-Liang Lin, pianist Andre-Michel Schub, and Chamber Music Society artistic director, clarinetist David Shifrin and includes Schubert’s “Trout Quintet,” Brahms’ “A-Major Violin Sonata,” and Edgar Meyer’s new “Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Bass.”

Tickets cost $20 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 610-330-5009.

The performance is part of the premiere tour of Meyer’s new work. His first appearance at Lafayette was also as composer-performer, presenting “Quintet for Strings” with the Emerson String Quartet in September 1996. Meyer returned the following year in a folk program with banjo player Bela Fleck and mandolin player Mike Marshall, and he gave a recital last February with pianist Amy Dorfman. The other returning musician is pianist Andre-Michel Schub, who played the dedication concert on the Williams Center’s new grand piano during its opening year in February 1984 and returned for another concert in February 1994.

Schub won the gold medal in the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition, the last American-born pianist to be so honored. Shifrin has garnered numerous honors as recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber music artist. He is also an Avery Fisher prize winner, director of Chamber Music Northwest, which commissioned Meyer’s Trio, and has been heard in the Lehigh Valley as guest artist of the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra. Other members of the Chamber Music Society members performing in the ensemble are cellist Gary Hoffman, and violist Paul Neubauer.

Considered by some to be the world’s greatest bassist, Meyer was the first bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994. Meyer can be heard on more than 100 recordings, ranging from James Taylor, the Chieftains, Lyle Lovett, and the Indigo Girls to Pamela Frank and Emanuel Ax. A recording with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor, Appalachia Waltz, topped the Billboard classical music chart for 16 weeks in 1997, and his best-selling collaboration with Fleck and Mike Marshall, Uncommon Ritual, broke similar ground in sales and acclaim. A recent release, Short Journey Home, explored similar collaborations with violinist Joshua Bell.

Meyer’s taste for the eclectic was developed in a childhood where the turntable at home alternated Beethoven symphonies with John Coltrane and Miles Davis. At the age of four, his family moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Oakridge, Tennessee, near the heart of country music. His father is a bass player who started Meyer on the instrument at age five. In 1981, Meyer won first place in 1981 Zimmerman-Mingus Bass Competition. Following two years of studying math at Georgia Tech, Meyer transferred to Indiana University in 1984, where he studied with every member of the school’s string faculty. Meyer became a regular at the Aspen and Sante Fe festivals in the mid-1980s. In 1985, the album Unfolding marked the beginning of a popular solo career.

Lin earned Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year award last year and Musician of the Year award in 1999. “Jimmy Lin…has become a beloved icon…He communicates through music to that wider audience that always seems to recognize and reward the rare combination of virtuosity and humanity,” wrote the Los Angles Times. Reviewing one of his concerts, the Boston Globe declared, “Lin proved himself a first-class dazzler.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported: “Fastidious sense of rhythm, supple phrasing, an ability to color his playing with the subtle intensity of great painting and a superb sense of style and dynamic control…Lin has it all.”

One of the foremost violin virtuosos of today, Lin appears annually with major orchestras and on key recital and chamber music series on five continents. His 2000-2001 season includes appearances with the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic and the Vancouver Symphony, among others. Overseas engagements include performances in Sweden, Spain, Japan and Taiwan, He also assumes the post of artistic director of SummerFest La Jolla, with his inaugural season taking place in August, 2001.

Lin canvassed the globe during the summer of 2000. He began with a trip to Singapore and Japan, where he celebrated Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday in a gala concert in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. He later performed the Sibelius concerto at the Naantali Festival in Finland, and returned to Chile and Argentina to play with the orchestras in Santiago and Buenos Aires. In the U.S., he played at the Aspen Music Festival and with the Cincinnati Symphony. He rounded out the summer by playing in the Olympic Arts Festival in Sydney with the Asian Youth orchestra.

Lin returned to Taiwan in May 2000 to present his second Taipei International Music Festival. Founded by Lin in 1997 at the invitation of the president of Taiwan, it is the first large-scale international music festival in the history of his native country. He performed in seven sold-out concerts. Some were shown on giant television simulcasts outside the concert hall, and each event drew up to 30,000 fans.

Lin has released many recordings on the Sony Classical label, some of which have won awards such as Gramophone’s Record of the Year, as well as Grammy nominations.

Born in Taiwan in 1960, Lin began his violin lessons at age five. Within two years of his enrollment at the Juilliard School, he won the first Queen Sofia Violin Competition in Madrid and a concert career was soon launched. He has been a member of the Juilliard faculty since 1991 and resides in New York with his wife Deborah.

The 2000-2001 Performance Series at Lafayette is cosponsored, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Foundation for the Arts, and New England Foundation for the Arts.