As I opened my office door at Cornell for the first time this year to welcome the Class of 2019 (yes, the incoming college freshman class was born in 1998…yowza), I couldn’t help but pause and look back at the wonderfully wall-to-wall summer of music making I just finished. Here are some highlights…
The summer began with a Knights tour of Germany and Austria (which concluded with a performance in the incomparable Musikverein), and unexpectedly continued onto Italy where I joined Brooklyn Rider and percussionist Ian Rosenbaum for an exhilarating concert at the American Academy in Rome featuring quartets by Andy Akiho and Paula Matthesun…
June brought our final concert of the 2015-2016 season with the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota featuring music by Paul Schoenfield, then the glory of Arvo Pärt’s double violin concerto, “Tabula Rasa” (which I had the pleasure of learning alongside the fabulous Tessa Lark), and a visit from my incredible parents, Ellen and Young-Nam (we had a lovely evening with two of my favorite ladies, Ieva and Alma, and even found time for a beach day!)…
July was packed with another Knights tour to the Ravinia Festival, serving on the faculty (for the first time – it was divine!) at the Crowden Music Center’s Summer Chamber Music Institute in Berkeley, CA (where I even had a bit of time to catch up with old friends and family), album editing (albeit at a glacial pace), a little “Spanish immersion” as The Knights explored a program of Latin music, and a couple of great birthday hangs…
August began with one of my favorite weeks of the year, PACO Camp! It’s an intensive chamber music festival out in the Redwood Forest in California where talented and dedicated Bay Area students come together to eat, sleep, and breathe quartets. With a few days off in-between to get some record editing done, it concluded with 8 special days up in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota for the Northern Lights Chamber Music Institute, where I played, coached, and made my “debut” as a “percussionist” playing a little cajon (whoa, boy) with the kids on Colin Jacobsen and Siamak Aghei’s “Ascending Bird”….
I said goodbye to summer with Labor Day weekend 2015 spent with two very dear friends, Larry and Trudy Rankin in Lakeland, FL; with an evening at the sea and a house concert to honor our beloved Corry Rankin, a classmate of mine who passed away in 2002, it was a beautifully powerful time of remembrance and fellowship. I made my way back to Ithaca to finalize the details of having 71 violinists (!) on campus this year and hit the ground running with my fabulous new studio of fiddlers and chamber ensembles…
And here we go, off to the races for Fall 2015!
Love from 149th Street…
Ariana