Concerts @ the Hammert Presents
Cortona Collective Trio
Sarah Brady, flute
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, cello
Michael Kirkendoll, piano
Performing: George Crumb’s Vox Balanae (Voice of the Whale) and more
The Cortona Collective is the performing ensemble featuring faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music. The Collective creates unique ‘bands’ to perform music of the 20th and 21st Centuries. This concert is being presented in conjunction with the Origami Whales Project to raise awareness for whale conservation and protection.
Called “enchanting” by the Boston Globe, flutist Sarah Brady is sought after across the country as a soloist, chamber musician, and master teacher. An avid promoter of new music she has premiered and recorded new music from many of today’s top composers. Recent projects have included premieres of new solo flute and electronic music from Elena Ruehr, Andy Vores, Marti Epstein, Reinaldo Moya and John Mallia, Curtis Hughes as well as music for flute and strings from Marcos Balter, Nicholas Vines and Johnathan Bailey Holland. Her solo, chamber and over 50 orchestral recordings can be heard on the Albany, Naxos, Oxingale, Cantalope and BMOP/Sound music labels. As a leading interpreter of contemporary music, she was invited to read and record new music commissioned by Yo Yo Ma for his Silk Road Project at Tanglewood.
Sarah lives in Boston and performs regularly as principal flute with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera. She can also be heard performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Boston Ballet, Portland Symphony Orchestra and Boston Lyric Opera. As a chamber musician she has been described as “clairvoyantly sensitive” (New Music Connoisseur), and has collaborated with the Fromm Players at Harvard, the Firebird Ensemble, the Radius Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, The Talea Ensemble, Callithumpian Consort, Sound Icon and NotaRiotous. She is a member of the Michigan based new music ensemble Brave New Works a group that is dedicated to promoting new music throughout the US and Canada by premiering new music and educating young composers through a college residency program. The ensemble has been in residence at Cornell, Bowling Green University, the University of Michigan, Tufts University, University of Puget Sound, Williams, Western Washington University and the Boston Conservatory.
In competition she was awarded second place in the National Flute Association 2006 Young Artist Competition, where she also won an award for the best performance of the newly commissioned work by Paul Drescher. She was a Semi-finalist in the Myrna Brown Competition Flute Competition, Heida Herman Woodwind Competition, Eastern Connecticut Young Artist Competition, and twice received second place in Boston’s prestigious Pappoutsakis Flute Competition. As a soloist Sarah enjoyed a sold out debut at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall with pianist Oxana Yablonskaya.
Currently, Sarah is the Director of the Contemporary Classical Music Department as well as Associate Professor of Flute at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
While all the other kids were learning addition in first grade, Kivie Cahn-Lipman was running around the classroom singing that he was a yeti. His kindly teacher said he was very musical, so Kivie was allowed his choice of instruments along with the therapy. He told his parents he wanted to play the drums, so they asked him what instrument he REALLY wanted to play. "The tuba," he replied, and they handed him a violin. The violin teacher was all "you can't touch the violin until you've learned to respect the violin," but in their third lesson Kivie picked his nose and wiped it on the violin, and then that teacher went away and Kivie's parents gave him a cello. And when he picked his nose and wiped it on the cello, the new teacher was like "ewww gross don't do that, here's a tissue, clean that up and let's play music," and that seemed like a good idea.
Eventually Kivie went to Oberlin and then Juilliard, and after awhile each school gave him a fancy document written in Latin that hopefully indicates that he graduated. He finished up his education at the University of Cincinnati, and he's a doctor now. Not that kind of doctor. Since its foundation in 2001, Kivie has been the cellist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (and please don't abbreviate it to “ICE” anymore), and he still tours all over the world performing with them. He served on the faculties of Smith College and Mount Holyoke College from 2005–2012 and The College of New Jersey from 2015-2017, and he’s now an Assistant Professor of Cello at Youngstown State University.
Kivie also plays the viola da gamba for some reason, and he performs and records with LeStrange Viols. He formed ACRONYM because he found a bunch of seventeenth-century music in old manuscripts and wanted to play it with his friends; they've got eight CDs of modern premieres recorded and more on the way. Kivie's 2014 solo recording of J.S. Bach's cello suites got a nice blurb in a trade publication called The Strad, but he's way more proud of the warm personal letter praising the disc which he received from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kivie's mom also claims to like the recording, although she thinks some of the tempos are too fast. You can find it on sale wherever you can still find music on sale, and the discs make great coasters.
Also, a recent review in the New York Times noted that "his long, flowing hair often covered his face as he played." Seriously, the New York Times printed that. Kivie mostly stopped picking his nose in 1985.