Elemental Music’s Chamber Music Institute is excited to announce our two master class guests for the 2023/24 season.
Jennifer Kloetzel, cello, and Lina Bahn, violin, will each visit our program this season and present a master class for our Chamber Music Institute students. Both Kloetzel and Bahn are incredible musicians and educators, and we are thrilled for our students to have the opportunity to learn from these exceptional artists.
Learn more about our guests below.
Saturday, February 10 - Master class with Jennifer Kloetzel
1–3pm at Elemental Music’s campus
A graduate of The Juilliard School and a Fulbright Scholar, cellist Jennifer Kloetzel has concertized throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia as a soloist and chamber musician. A founding member of the San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet (1996-2016) and QuartetES, Ms. Kloetzel has toured the globe and performed at such renowned venues as Lincoln Center, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Chautauqua Institute and the Ravinia Festival, the Lobkowicz Palaces in both Vienna and Prague, as well as prominent colleges and conservatories worldwide.
Ms. Kloetzel is known for her elegant playing and vibrant tone. She is a sought-after recitalist, performing concerts for San Francisco Performances and on WQXR in New York. The Strad Magazine raved, “Cellist Jennifer Kloetzel is impressively passionate…” The Cello Museum proclaimed that her “energy, ceaseless intellectual curiosity, and virtuosic command of the instrument unite in exceptional musicianship, making her truly a hero of the cello.” Ms. Kloetzel has recorded 36 CDs, including the entire cycle of Beethoven Quartets and Brahms Sextets on the Avie label. Most recently, she released “Beethoven: The Conquering Hero,” the complete works for cello and piano (with Robert Koenig), which was chosen as “Recording of the Month” by BBC Music Magazine in March 2022 and stated, “If only more cellists would play like this—and at this level of ceaseless musicianship… Kloetzel’s playing responds unerringly to the shift of creative tone at each stage of the composer’s development.” The review went on to state Ms. Kloetzel’s playing was “a masterclass in how to engage with the most powerful creative personality music has known.” Gramophone magazine hailed the Beethoven collection for “cello playing that’s notable for its warmth, inward expressiveness… Kloetzel comes across as so utterly natural.”
A champion of new music, Ms. Kloetzel received the Copland Award for engaging living American Composers, commissioning and premiering over 50 works, including five concertos written specifically for her. In 2016, Ms. Kloetzel was invited to join the faculty at University of California Santa Barbara, where she is Professor of Cello and serves as both Head of the String and Performance Areas. For more information, visit jkcello.com.
Saturday, May 4 - Master class with Lina Bahn
4–6pm at Elemental Music’s campus
Lina Bahn is a violinist with a keen interest in collaborative and innovative repertoire, and has been called “brilliant” and “lyrical” by the Washington Post. Her publication of Mean Fiddle Summer (Naxos Label) was hailed, “From start to finish, the violinist demonstrates her adroit technical facility, kaleidoscope of colors, and consummate musical taste.” She is a dedicated collaborator, with recent performance at the Oregon Bach Festival presenting Akoka: Reframing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time with Matt Haimovitz, Kathleen Tagg, and David Krakauer. In 2010, she was a guest performer with the Takacs Quartet on their Spring tour at Strathmore Hall, Concertgebouw Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Mariinsky Theater, and Queen Elizabeth Hall. From 1998-2010, Lina was a member of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet, lauded by the Strad Magazine, and which earned the ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming. Their Naxos Records recording was selected by The New Yorker magazine as one of the year’s “Best 10 Recordings”, and the CQ have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today, All Things Considered, and Backstage Pass, Chicago’s WFMT’s Live From Studio One, and can be heard on the Albany, CRI, Naxos, and Bayer Labels. For fourteen years, Bahn served as the Executive Director and violinist with the VERGE Ensemble of the Contemporary Music Forum in residency at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
As a passionate educator, she was on the faculty at the University of Colorado-Boulder from 2008-2015, and has taught masterclasses and lessons throughout the world, including those at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in Singapore, the Sydney Conservatory, Hong Kong University, Renmin University in Beijing, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, among others. She is currently on faculty at the Thornton School of Music at USC, where she has taught since 2015. Bahn is a graduate of the Juilliard School under the guidance of Dorothy DeLay. She received early training from Almita and Roland Vamos, and completed her graduate degrees from University of Michigan with Paul Kantor and Indiana University with Miriam Fried.