Cassatt String Quartet To Perform at Gerald Cohen Composer Portrait Concert At Jewish Theological Seminary

The highly regarded Cassatt String Quartet will perform in an in-person and online concert, Reaching for the Heavens: The Music of Composer Gerald Cohen, in the new auditorium at the Jewish Theological Seminary (3080 Broadway, New York, NY 10027), at 7:30 pm EDT on Tuesday evening, May 10, 2022. This concert, sponsored by the H. L. Miller Cantorial School, is part of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)'s opening season.

With a long history of collaboration with Gerald Cohen, The Cassatts will perform Preludes and Debka, and Voyagers, a piece composed for the ensemble. Artists also featured in this concert also include Ilana Davidson, soprano; Heather Johnson, mezzo-soprano; Alexandra Joan, piano; Narek Arutyunian, clarinet; and Haim Avitsur, trombone.

The full program follows:

Gerald Cohen Sea of Reeds*

Amid the Alien Corn*

Preludes and Debka

Voyagers**

*World Premiere

**Composed for the Cassatt String Quartet

General admission of $20, discounted tickets for JTS student, faculty, or staff of $10 can be purchased at the event website. Registration of $10 for the online stream of the concert can be purchased here. For more information please visit the JTS website, and the Cassatt String Quartet's website.

Acclaimed as one of America's outstanding ensembles, the New York City-based Cassatt String Quartet has performed throughout the world, with appearances at Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York; Tanglewood Music Theater; the Kennedy Center,Washington, DC; Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris; Centro National de las Artes, Mexico City; Maeda Hall, Tokyo; and Beijing Central Conservatory. At the Library of Congress, the Cassatt performed on the library's matched quartet of Stradivarius instruments.

Esteemed music critic Alex Ross named The Cassatt three times to his "10 Best Classical Recordings" in The NewYorker, and the ensemble has been featured on NPR's "Performance Today," Boston's WGBH, New York's WQXR, and WNYC, on Canada's CBC Radio, and on Radio France.

The Cassatt's numerous awards are from the National Endowment for the Arts, the USArtists International, Chamber Music America, CMA/ASCAP, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Meet the Composer, and the Amphion, Copland, Fromm and Alice M. Ditson Music Foundations. Since 1995, the ensemble has been on the performing artist roster for the New York State Council on the Arts.

With a deep commitment to nurturing young musicians, the Cassatt has offered classes for composers and performers at the American Academy, Rome; the Toho School, Tokyo; Bowdoin International Music Festival; Columbia; Cornell; Princeton; Syracuse Universities, and the University of Pennsylvania. The quartet is in residence annually at Maine's Seal Bay Festival of American Contemporary Chamber Music and Cassatt in the Basin! in Texas.

Equally adept at classical masterpieces and contemporary music, the Cassatt has collaborated with members of the Tokyo, Cleveland, and Vermeer Quartets, pianists Ursula Oppens and Marc-Andre Hamelin, clarinetist David Shifrin, flutist Ransom Wilson, jazz pianist Fred Hersch, didgeriedoo player Simon 7, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and composers Louis Andriessen, Kaija Saariaho, Joan Tower and John Corigliano. The Cassatt's discography includes new quartets by Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Stucky; Guggenheim fellow Daniel S. Godfrey; and Grawemeyer and Rome Prize winner Sebastian Currier.

Named for the celebrated impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the quartet consists of Muneko Otani, violin; Jennifer Leshnower, violin; Rosemary Nelis, viola; and Gwen Krosnick, cello.

Gerald Cohen is an assistant professor at the H. L. Miller Cantorial School of JTS, on the faculty of Hebrew Union College, and has been cantor at Shaarei Tikvah (Scarsdale, New York) for 35 years. As a composer, he has been praised for his "linguistic fluidity and melodic gift," creating music that "reveals a very personal modernism that . . . offers great emotional rewards" (Gramophone Magazine).

His opera, Steal a Pencil for Me, based on a true concentration camp love story, had its world premiere production by Opera Colorado in January 2018; excerpts were featured at Fort Worth Opera's Frontiers Festival in 2016.

Cohen's earlier opera Sarah and Hagar, based on the story from the book of Genesis, has been performed in concert form. Cohen is a noted synagogue cantor and baritone; his experience as a singer informs his dramatic, lyrical compositions. Cohen's best-known work, his "shimmering setting" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) of Psalm 23, has received thousands of performances from synagogues and churches to Carnegie Hall and the Vatican. Among his recent chamber music works are Playing for our Lives and Voyagers; these compositions, composed for the Cassatt String Quartet, will be the centerpieces of an album of Cohen's music to be released on Innova Recordings in 2022.

Recognition of Cohen's body of work includes commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, American Composers Forum, residencies including those at Copland House, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and American Lyric Theater, as well as Cantors Assembly's Max Wohlberg Award for distinguished achievement in the field of Jewish composition, and the Hallel V'Zimrah Award from the Zamir Choral Foundation. Cohen received a BA in music from Yale and a DMA in music composition from Columbia. His compositions have been published by Oxford University Press, G. Schirmer / AMP and Transcontinental Music.