Manhattan Chamber Players official site | Manhattan Chamber Players | Manhattan Chamber Players

The Manhattan Chamber Players is a chamber music collective of New York-based musicians who share the common aim of performing the greatest works in the chamber repertoire at the highest level.  Formed in 2015 by Artistic Director Luke Fleming, MCP is comprised of an impressive roster of musicians who all come from the tradition of great music making at the Marlboro Music Festival, Steans Institute at Ravinia, Music@Menlo, Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival and Perlman Music Program, and are former students of the Curtis Institute, Juilliard School, Colburn School, New England Conservatory, and Yale School of Music.

At the core of MCP’s inspiration is its members’ joy in playing this richly varied repertoire with longtime friends and colleagues, with whom they have been performing since they were students.  Building upon that foundation, new works commissioned from its composer members keep the ensemble firmly grounded in the music of both the past and present.  Its roster allows for the programming of virtually all the core string, wind, and piano chamber music repertoire—from piano duos to clarinet quintets to string octets.  While all its members have independent careers as soloists and chamber musicians, they strive for every opportunity to come together and again share in this special collaboration.

Members of MCP are current and former members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, ACJW, and the Amphion, Attacca, Dover, Escher, Vega, and Ying Quartets, and the Lysander, Madison, and Sheridan Piano Trios.  They are top prizewinners in the Banff, Concert Artists Guild, Fischoff, Melbourne, Naumburg, Osaka, Primrose, Queen Elisabeth, Rubenstein, Tchaikovsky, Tertis, and Young Concert Artists Competitions, and are some of the most sought after solo and chamber performers of their generation.  During its inaugural season, in addition to numerous concerts across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia, the Manhattan Chamber Players has been featured multiple times on NPR’s Performance Today, and is the Ensemble-in-Residence at both the Northern Lights Music Festival in Mexico and the Crescent City Chamber Music Festival in New Orleans. Upcoming seasons add tours of Israel, France, China, and Brazil to MCP’s busy concert schedule in NYC and across the U.S.

Manhattan Chamber Players is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

Photo credit: Sophie Zhai

JP Jofre, Bandoneon and Composer

JP Jofre official site

A native of San Juan, Argentina, JP Jofre is a award-winning bandoneon player and composer.  Mr. Jofre has been repeatedly highlighted by The New York Times and praised as one of today’s leading artists by Great Performers at Lincoln Center. His music has been recorded by 17-time Grammy Winner Paquito D’ Rivera and choreographed/performed by ballet-star Herman Cornejo (Principal Dancer of the American Ballet Theatre). A recipient of the National Prize of the Arts grant in Argentina, Mr. Jofre has taken his form of contemporary tango to some of the most important venues in Asia, Europe, America and the Caribbean as soloist and composer. He has collaborated with many famous musicians in a wide range of musical styles, including Paquito D’Rivera, Kathryn Stott, Gloria Estefan, Symphony Silicon Valley, Santa Rosa Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Argentina, San Antonio Symphony Philippe Quint, Fernando Otero, Dallas Symphony, Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Concert Series, Napa Symphony and Fred Sturm among others.

Mr. Jofre has been part of many prestigious festivals, including the Celebrity Series of Boston, Google Talks, TEDtalks, Umbria Jazz Festival, Great Performers at Lincoln Center, Seattle Town, Belgorod Music Festival (Russia), Sudtirol Jazz Festival, and Bachanalia Taiwan, among others. For the world premiere of his Bandoneon Concerto, The Mercury News wrote: “…he is an electrifying composer-bandoneon player.”  In 2012, Mr. Jofre was invited by the Free University of Bolzano and SudTirol Festival (Italy) to perform for the homage to Argentinean Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel. He proudly uses the New AA by Bandonion Fabrik Klingenthal. Mr. Jofre has recently received two commissions by violinist-conductor Michael Guttman and Manhattan Chamber Players Violinist Francisco Fullana in collaboration with the San Antonio Chamber Orchestra and Metropolis Ensemble to write two double concertos for violin and bandoneon.

Vivian Fung official site

JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. Her work often assimilates disparate influences such as non-Western folk music, Brazilian rhythms, and visual inspirations.

Fung has enjoyed numerous high-profile projects in recent years as her music has continued to move in new directions. Her Violin Concerto No. 2 was commissioned and premiered in February 2015 by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with Jonathan Crow, violin. Last year, her Biennale Snapshots opened the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s 2015-16 season alongside Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The 25-minute work, commissioned by the Vancouver Biennale and inspired by five artworks from the Biennale exhibition, garnered much attention: “If [violinist] Miriam Fried was what everyone was talking about when they arrived at the concert … Vivian Fung was all they talked about when they left” (Georgia Straight, Sept. 28, 2015).

Among Fung’s upcoming premieres are a new fanfare for the Toronto Symphony and Ontario Philharmonic; Bounce, a new Horn Trio for Boston Symphony principal hornist James Sommerville, violinist Scott St. John, and pianist Peter Longworth; a new work for the Daedalus Quartet and clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois, co-commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Northwest, and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; a work for cello and electronics, for a consortium of cellists in Canada and the U.S.; a new work for the San José Chamber Orchestra; and a new orchestral work commissioned by the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. Her 2016–17 season highlights include performances of Dust Devils with Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the U.S. premiere of Biennale Snapshots with the La Jolla Symphony, String Sinfonietta with Symphony Nova Scotia, and performances of Blaze with the Okanagan Symphony.

Many distinguished artists and ensembles around the world have embraced Fung’s music as part of the core repertoire. Conductors with whom she has collaborated include Justin Brown, Mei-Ann Chen, Andrew Cyr, Barbara Day Turner, Peter Oundjian, Edwin Outwater, Steven Schick, Gerard Schwarz, and Bramwell Tovey. Fung’s Glimpses for prepared piano has been championed by a diverse group of pianists, including Conor Hanick, Jenny Lin, Margaret Leng Tan, and Bryan Wagorn. Fung’s orchestral and chamber works have also been performed by the Alabama Symphony, American Opera Projects, Chicago Sinfonietta, Milwaukee Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, San José Chamber Orchestra, Shanghai Quartet, Staatskapelle Karlsruhe, Suwon Chorale of South Korea, and Ying Quartet, to name a few.

In 2012, Naxos Canadian Classics released a recording of Fung’s Violin Concerto [No.1], Piano Concerto “Dreamscapes,” and Glimpses. The Violin Concerto earned Fung the 2013 JUNO Award for “Classical Composition of the Year.” Several other of Fung’s works have been released commercially on the Telarc, Çedille, Innova, and Signpost labels.
Fung traveled to Southwest China in 2012 for ethno-musicological research to study minority music and cultures in the Yunnan province, continuing research that previously inspired Yunnan Folk Songs (2011), commissioned by Fulcrum Point New Music in Chicago with support from the MAP Fund. Following the premiere performance, The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Yunnan Folk Songs stood out … [with] a winning rawness that went beyond exoticism.” As a composer whose travels often inspire her music, Fung has also explored diverse cultures in North Vietnam, Spain, and Indonesia. She toured Bali in 2004, 2008, and 2010, and competed in the Bali Arts Festival as an ensemble member and composer in Gamelan Dharma Swara.

Fung has received numerous awards and grants, including the 2015 Jan V. Matejcek New Classical Music Award for achievement in new music from the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), a Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Gregory Millard Fellowship, and grants from ASCAP, BMI, American Music Center, MAP Fund, American Symphony Orchestra League, American Composers Forum, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre and is serving a three-year term as a board member of the American Composers Forum.

Born in Edmonton, Canada, Fung began her composition studies with composer Violet Archer and received her doctorate from The Juilliard School in New York, where her mentors included David Diamond and Robert Beaser. She was a faculty member at Juilliard from 2002 to 2010 and currently lives in California with her husband Charles Boudreau, their son Julian, and their shiba inu, Mulan.

Michael Guttman is an eminent violin soloist, conductor and music director of festivals around the world. At age ten, he became the youngest student ever to be admitted into the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music. Encouraged by his late mentor Isaac Stern, Guttman studied at the Juilliard School in New York with Dorothy Delay, the Juilliard Quartet and Felix Galimir. Mr. Guttman has earned critical acclaim from The New York Times for his “incredible wealth of tone colors and his sound of melting beauty,” and was described by The Jerusalem Post as the “Chagall of violinists.” He has performed in halls such as London’s Barbican Centre, New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Paris’s Salle Pleyel, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Tokyo’s Bunko Kaikan. He collaborated with the late conductor and composer Lukas Foss at the Music Festival of the Hamptons, a relationship that initiated his conducting career.

Mr. Guttman is the principal guest conductor of the Brussels Chamber Orchestra, the leader of the acclaimed Arriaga Quartet and of the Michael Guttman Tango Quartet, as well as the Founding Artistic Director of Pietrasanta in Concerto, the highly praised music festival in Tuscany. The Paris Camerata, an ensemble created by Guttman, will make its Italian debut at both festivals this summer. As a conductor, he has collaborated with such artists as Martha Argerich, Peter Serkin, James Galway and Richard Stolztman. Following his recording of three concertos by Israeli composers with the London Philarmonic and the late David Shallon, Mr. Guttman performed with most Israeli orchestras and will play the concerto by Noam Sheriff with the Israel Philharmonic. Like his mentor Isaac Stern, Guttman is dedicated to helping young artists, notably at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Brussels.