Perspectives Ensemble Presents Wendy Sutter, Cellist, Performing The Six Bach Solo Cello Suites

Perspectives Ensemble, in cooperation with the Judson Memorial Church, presents The Six Bach Solo Cello Suites performed by Wendy Sutter, cellist, on Sunday, August 23, 2020.

Suites 1-3 will be performed at 3pm EDT and Suites 4-6 will be performed at 6pm EDT. Honed over a lifetime of close engagement with these iconic works, Ms. Sutter's intensely personal interpretations will be streamed from the serenely beautiful Meeting Room of Judson Memorial Church. The concerts will also feature guest commentaries by Don Byron, Tim Page, George Stauffer, and Kira Thurman.

To register for the free performances, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/js-bach-the-six-bach-cello-suites-performed-by-wendy-sutter-part-i-tickets-115522355475 for Suites 1-3 and www.eventbrite.com/e/js-bach-the-six-solo-cello-suites-performed-by-wendy-sutter-part-ii-tickets-115528499853 for Suites 4-6. Video engineering by Ross Karre; audio engineering by Ryan Streber, Oktaven Audio. Livestream performances made possible by the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Foundation in celebration of the life of Danièle Doctorow.

Heralded as "one of the great leading cellists of the classical stage" by the Wall Street Journal, Wendy Sutter has proven herself as one of the foremost and diverse soloists of her generation. Having performed widely on five continents, she has been acclaimed by critics in all major publications including The New York Times, Strad Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Ms. Sutter has appeared frequently as concerto soloist with such orchestras as The Dallas, Seattle, Colorado, Tucson, Shanghai Symphonies, The Hong Kong and Brussels Philharmonics and The Royal Residentie Orchestra of the Hague. As soloist, she has performed under many esteemed conductors, including Jaap van Zweden, Marin Alsop, Gerard Schwarz and Tan Dun. Ms. Sutter appears regularly at festivals including Marlboro, Mostly Mozart, Spoleto, Ravinia, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. In addition, she has played numerous solo recitals at venues such as The Barbican, Carnegie Hall, Bargemusic, and Lincoln Center. Philip Glass's solo cello suite "Songs and Poems," written exclusively for Sutter by Glass in 2007, won great acclaim from audiences and critics world-wide, was voted best new CD of the year by listeners of National Public Radio, and became the second-best selling download in 2008 in the classical division on iTunes. In 1994 Ms. Sutter was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to give the world premiere of "A Suite of Dances," an on-stage duet for Ms. Sutter playing Bach solo suites for cello, accompanying Mikhail Baryshnikov. This piece was choreographed especially for these two artists by the legendary Jerome Robbins.

Commentary Cameos:

Don Byron is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. Rooted in jazz, Byron's music is stylistically eclectic, covering a range of styles from klezmer music and German lieder, to Raymond Scott's "cartoon-jazz," hard rock/metal, and rap. He has also composed for silent film, served as the Director of Jazz for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and scored for television.

Tim Page won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 for his writings about music in the Washington Post. Since 2008, he has been a Professor of Music and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

George Stauffer is Dean Emeritus of the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Music History at Rutgers University. A Guggenheim, Fulbright, and ACLS scholar, Stauffer has published eight books on music of the Baroque Era and the life and works of J.S. Bach and is a contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

Kira Thurman is an assistant professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, she is finishing a book on the history of Black musicians in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (forthcoming, Cornell University Press), and recently published an essay on Marian Anderson in The New Yorker.