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Meet the Artists
Meet the Artists
Justin Burgess returns to Washington National Opera in 2025 to sing the role of Paul Jobs in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. In 2024, he will debut with Opera Las Vegas as Adraste in the world premiere of Conrad Cummings and Mark Campbell's Again & Again & Again, perform Barber's Dover Beach with the Kennedy Center Chamber Players, sing as the baritone soloist in Carmina Burana with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, and cover Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia at Lyric Opera of Kansas City.
Burgess recently completed his tenure as a Cafritz Young Artist at Washington National Opera, where he sang Schuanard in La bohème, Mercutio in Roméo et Juliette, A Mobster/The Guide in Songbird, and Donkey in Jeanine Tesori's The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me.
Leah Arsenault Barrick was appointed assistant principal flute with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Her previous positions include acting associate principal flute with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and second flute with the Louisville Orchestra, as well as appearances as guest principal flute with the Seattle Symphony and as principal flute with the Crested Butte Music Festival.
Barrick was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and has served as a member of the Spoleto Festival (USA) orchestra and the National Repertory Orchestra. In addition to her professional engagements, she has won First Prize in the National Flute Association Young Artist Competition, the Myrna Brown Young Artist Competition, and the Frank Bowen Young Artist Competition.
Barrick grew up in Southern Maine and began playing the flute at age nine. She earned her high school diploma from the North Carolina School of the Arts and her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. She received a Professional Studies Certificate from the Colburn School Conservatory of Music.
In addition to her time as a performer, Leah Barrick has served in teaching positions at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park. She also enjoys working with flutists out of her home studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, where her students range from beginners to advanced high schoolers to adult amateurs.
Nurit Bar-Josef was appointed concertmaster of the National Symphony Orchestra in 2001 (then the youngest such appointee to a major U.S. orchestra) by then-Music Director Leonard Slatkin. She was previously assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops from 1998 to 2001 and assistant principal second violin of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 1998.
Bar-Josef studied with Aaron Rosand at The Curtis Institute of Music and continued her studies at The Juilliard School with Robert Mann. Her solo appearances have included the National Symphony, Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, St. Louis Symphony, National Philharmonic, and Britt Festival Orchestras, among others. She has been guest concertmaster for the Seattle Symphony, Houston Symphony, Arizona Fest Orchestra, and Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra.
An active chamber musician, she has since performed at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Bay Chamber Festival (ME) and Aspen Music Festival, and festivals in Tanglewood, Portland (ME), Kingston (RI), Steamboat Springs, Garth Newel, and Caramoor, where she performed piano quartets with Andre Previn at his Rising Stars Festival.
She was a founding member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players for nine years and is a founding member of the Dryden Quartet. Bar-Josef has been a featured guest on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition and has had the honor of performing at the White House with Maestro Christoph Eschenbach. She is currently playing on a G.B. Guadagnini, 1773, the ex-Grumiaux, ex-Silverstein.
Marissa Regni is principal second violin of the National Symphony Orchestra, a position she assumed in September of 1996. Before coming to Washington, D.C., she was a member of the Saint Louis Symphony, where she served as assistant principal second violin. Regni is a member of the critically acclaimed Manchester String Quartet and is a founding member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players. With the Chamber Players, she performed concerts on a transatlantic crossing of the Queen Mary 2 and at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. From May 2020 to 2021 she was the co-creator and host of the 53-week web series NSO@Home Live.
Regni has made solo and chamber music appearances throughout the United States, Germany, and Mexico. She has collaborated with such artists as Christoph Eschenbach, Joseph Silverstein, Julius Baker, The Angeles Quartet, Arturo Delmoni, The Walden Chamber Players, and 20th Century Consort. Solo appearances with orchestras include the Saint Louis Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Chamber Orchestra, Livingston (New Jersey) Symphony, and the Ridgewood (New Jersey) Symphony. She has been a featured artist on NPR and The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
In addition to her orchestral, chamber, and solo work, Regni has a strong passion for educational concerts. She developed a popular series of children’s programs, which she performs at the Kennedy Center, around greater Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. She has been the co-creator and host of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Young People’s Concerts since 2014.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Regni received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and was awarded the school’s prestigious Performer’s Certificate in Violin. She also has a diploma from The Juilliard School of Music, where she was a student in the Pre-College Division.
National Symphony Orchestra Principal Violist Daniel Foster’s varied career encompasses orchestral, chamber and solo playing, as well as teaching. Since capturing the First Prize in both the William Primrose and Washington International Competitions, he has appeared in recital and as soloist with orchestra in Washington, DC and throughout the United States. After Studying with Jeffrey Irvine and Lynne Ramsey at Oberlin Conservatory and with Karen Tuttle at The Curtis Institute, Mr. Foster joined the National Symphony’s viola section in 1993, and was appointed Principal by Music Director Leonard Slatkin in 1995. Mr. Foster has appeared frequently as soloist with the National Symphony since his appointment.
Mr. Foster was a member of the critically acclaimed Dryden Quartet, which he founded along with his cousins Nicolas and Yumi Kendall and National Symphony Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef. He is currently a member of the 21st Century Consort, and is a founding member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players. Mr. Foster has performed chamber music at the Marlboro, Bowdoin, Killington and Alpenglow Festivals, and at Strings in the Mountains. Mr. Foster appears regularly on a number of chamber music series in the Washington, DC area.
Mr. Foster is on the faculty at the University of Maryland, where his former students have gone on to major orchestral and university positions, and he has been a faculty member at the Bowdoin and Killington festivals. Mr. Foster has given master classes at Oberlin and Peabody Conservatories, the University of Michigan and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is a member of the “International Principals” faculty at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.
Mr. Foster comes from a musical family. In addition to his violinist and cellist cousins, his father William was also a violist with the National Symphony from 1968-2018, and his grandfather John Kendall was a renowned violin pedagogue. His wife Adria Sternstein Foster is the Principal Flutist of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.
David Hardy, principal cello of the National Symphony Orchestra, achieved international recognition in 1982 as the top American prize winner at the seventh International Tchaikovsky Cello Competition in Moscow. Mr. Hardy won a special prize for the best performance of the Suite for Solo Cello by Victoria Yagling, commissioned for the competition. Tass particularly praised Mr. Hardy's performance of the Dvořák Cello Concerto. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, David Hardy began his cello studies there at the age of eight. He was 16 when he made his debut as soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
When he was 21 years old, Mr. Hardy won the certificate in the prestigious Geneva International Cello Competition. The next year, he was graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Laurence Lesser, Stephen Kates, and Berl Senofsky. In 1981 he was appointed to the National Symphony Orchestra as associate principal cello by its then music director, Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1994 Mr. Hardy was named principal cello of the NSO by its next music director, Leonard Slatkin. Mr. Hardy made his solo debut with the National Symphony Orchestra in 1986 with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting. A regular soloist with the NSO, Mr. Hardy, in 2004, gave the world premiere performance, with Leonard Slatkin conducting, of Stephen Jaffe's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, which was commissioned by the John and June Hechinger Fund for New Orchestral Works. Mr. Hardy gave the European premiere of the Jaffe concerto in Slovenia in 2007. Bridge Records released the premiere recording of the Concerto with Mr. Hardy and the Odense Symphony of Denmark.
The National Symphony Orchestra recording of John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 featuring Mr. Hardy's solo cello performance won the 1996 Grammy Award® for Best Classical Album. Another recent recording—in collaboration with NSO principal keyboard Lambert Orkis—is Beethoven Past & Present, consisting of two complete performances of Beethoven's eight works for piano and cello, performed on both modern and period instruments. Mr. Hardy is a founding member of the Opus 3 Trio with violinist Charles Wetherbee and pianist Lisa Emenheiser. The Opus 3 Trio has since performed to critical acclaim across the country and has commissioned, premiered, and recorded many new works. Mr. Hardy is also a founding member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players. Additionally, Mr. Hardy was cellist of the 20th Century Consort in Washington, D.C., where he premiered works by Stephen Albert, Nicholas Maw, and Joseph Schwantner. Mr. Hardy's playing can be heard on recordings under the Melodyia, Educo, RCA, London, Centaur, and Delos labels.
Critics in Washington and beyond have praised his virtuosic technique and deep musical sensitivity. Mr. Hardy's instruments were made by Carlo Giuseppe Testore in 1694 and Raymond Hardy in 2000.
In addition to his performing schedule, Mr. Hardy is professor of cello at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland.
Lambert Orkis's substantial career includes more than 11 years of concertizing with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. For 30 years, the celebrated duo of violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis has appeared to capacity audiences in the finest performance venues. The duo's many recordings and DVDs for Deutsche Grammophon include sonata cycles by Mozart (Choc de l'annee Award), Beethoven (Grammy Award®), and Brahms. Recent releases include The Silver Album celebrating 25 years of their artistic partnership, The Club Album issued in both CD and video formats, and a performance of Krzysztof Penderecki's Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano in commemoration of the composer's 85th birthday.
Orkis has premiered and recorded compositions by numerous composers for bridge Records, including solo works written for him by George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and James Primosch. With NSO Principal Cello David Hardy, Orkis performs Beethoven's cycle of works for piano and cello on the Sono Luminus label. He appears regularly at the most prestigious festivals throughout the world, such as the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals, and recently returned to Sydney as distinguished performing artist and teacher for Australia Musica Viva Festival. He performs and has recorded as a member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players and the Smithsonian Institution's Castle Trio (period instruments), and holds the positions of Principal Keyboard of the National Symphony Orchestra and Professor of Piano at Temple University in Philadelphia. The Federal Republic of Germany has bestowed upon Lambert Orkis the Cross of the Order of Merit in acknowledgment of his accomplishments.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello in D major, K. 285
During his stay in Mannheim at the end of 1777, Mozart met “a gentleman of means and a lover of all the sciences,” a Dutch surgeon named Ferdinand Dejean, who numbered among his accomplishments a certain ability on the flute. Dejean had heard of the 21-year-old musician’s extraordinary talent for composition from a mutual friend, Johann Baptist Wendling, the flutist with the Mannheim orchestra, and he commissioned Mozart to write three concertos and at least three quartets with strings for his instrument. Since he was, as always, short of money, Mozart accepted the proposal to help finance the swing he was then making through Germany and France in search of a permanent position. The next leg of the journey was to lead from Mannheim to Paris, and these flute pieces would help pay the bills.
Mozart could not generate much enthusiasm for the project. Already the trip was six months old, and he had not had so much as a hint of a firm job offer. He was flustered over a love affair recently hatched with a local singer, Aloysia Weber (whose sister he eventually married when this first choice became unavailable), and letters from his father in Salzburg persistently badgered him about his lack of a dependable income. Most of all, however, these flute works took time that he wanted to spend composing opera, the most alluring avenue to success for an 18th-century musician. He vented his frustration on the closest target —the flute —and vowed how he disliked it, and what a drudgery it was to have to write for an instrument for which he cared so little, and how he longed to get on with something more important. Still, Mozart was too full of pride and good taste to make hack work of these pieces, and he wrote to Papa Leopold, “Of course, I could merely scratch away at it all day long: but such a thing as this goes out into the world, so it is my wish that I need not be ashamed that it carries my name.” He managed to finish three of the quartets (K. 285, 285a and 285b) but completed only two of the concertos (the second one is actually just a transposition of the Oboe Concerto from the preceding year) by the time he left Mannheim. He settled with Dejean for just less than half of the original fee and let it go at that. Despite his disparagement of the instrument, Mozart’s compositions for flute occupy one of the most delightful niches of his incomparable musical legacy—Rudolf Gerber characterized them as combining “the perfect image of the spirit and feeling of the Rococo age with German sentiment.”
The D major Quartet (K. 285) opens with a crystalline sonata-form movement that the flute initiates with the presentation of the dashing principal melody. By the time the music has arrived at the second theme, a rising scalar configuration in triplet rhythms, it is clear that Mozart has endowed the flute with concerto-like prominence in this movement—only in the central development section does it relinquish its leadership in favor of some more democratic motivic discussion with its companions. The Adagio , in the expressive key of B minor, is a nocturnal cantilena for the flute couched upon a delicate cushion of plucked string sonorities. In his biography of the composer, Alfred Einstein wrote that this movement, suffused with “the sweetest melancholy, [is] perhaps the most beautiful accompanied flute solo that has even been written.” This irresistible Quartet closes with a buoyant rondo enlivened by frequent dialogues of the flute and the first violin.
Samuel Barber: Dover Beach for Baritone and String Quartet
Two important loves were continually evident in the life and music of Samuel Barber: the love of great literature and the love of the singing voice. Barber was a sensitive, cultured, and discriminating reader (in English, French, German, and Italian) of the best literature throughout his life, and he translated a number of those works into music. The Overture to The School for Scandal, one of his most frequently performed works, was, he noted, “suggested by Sheridan’s comedy.” Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was based on the words of James Agee. Shelley, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Matthew Arnold, James Joyce, and A.E. Housman inspired other pieces. Barber came by his love of the human voice almost as part of his birthright. His aunt was the great Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer, a frequent stage partner of Caruso, and her visits to the family home (with her husband, the art song composer Sidney Homer, who strongly encouraged his nephew’s musical interests) and recital performances of some of Barber’s early songs became a lasting influence on the young musician.
When Barber enrolled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia to undertake his professional training at age14 (he was the second student admitted to the newly founded school), he studied not only composition and piano, but also voice. He was good enough to give a number of professional recitals during his early years, and he even recorded his own Dover Beach with the Curtis String Quartet for RCA Victor in 1936. In his music, Barber integrated word and voice through his masterful handling of lyricism, structure, and harmonic color. “He belongs to the conservative American composers … in that he paid considerable attention to his architectonic construction, was not afraid to yield to fluent melodic writing, preferred simplicity to complexity, and was ever in search of a deeply poetic idea,” wrote musicologist David Ewen. Even more cogent was the evaluation by Barber’s fellow composer Virgil Thomson: “Romantic music, predominantly emotional, embodying sophisticated workmanship and complete care. Barber’s aesthetic position may be reactionary, but his melodic line sings and the harmony supports it.”
Barber set Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach in the fall of 1931, while he was still a student at Curtis, just before he began his Overture to The School for Scandal. Years later, he said that Dover Beach was a conscious effort to expand the scope of the concert song: “From Dover Beach on, I was concerned with the problem of creating an extended form for voice. In this regard, Dover Beach was the seminal piece, followed later by Knoxville, Andromache’s Farewell, and, in a certain sense, the Two Scenes for Soprano and Orchestra from Antony and Cleopatra.” No less a figure than Ralph Vaughan Williams attested that Barber succeeded in capturing the essence of Arnold’s verses. Vaughan Williams was lecturing at nearby Bryn Mawr College when Dover Beach was new, and Barber presented himself to the great English composer and sang the voice part and played the string parts at the piano. “I myself once set Dover Beach ,” Vaughan Williams told him, “but you really got it!” Barber, then still in his early twenties and just launching his career as a composer, later commented, “Enthusiasm for my music was rather uncommon at the time. Coming from a composer the stature of Vaughan Williams, I found it especially gratifying.”
The opening verses of Dover Beach are descriptive, portraying the lapping of the waves upon the shore with gently rocking motives in the quartet above which is suspended the thoughtful line of the vocalist. The music becomes more animated, and changes character with the words, “Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery.” The poem and its setting are brought to a climax with the lines beginning, “ Ah, Love, let us be true To one another,” after which the pensive mood of the opening returns to close this haunting creation.
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimm’ring and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Johannes Brahms: Quintet for Piano and String Quartet in F minor, Op. 34
When Brahms ambled into his favorite Viennese café one evening, so the story goes, a friend asked him how he had spent his day. “I was working on my symphony,” he replied. “In the morning I added an eighth note. In the afternoon I took it out.” The anecdote may be apocryphal, but its intent faithfully reflects Brahms’ painstaking process of creation, which is seen better perhaps nowhere than with the F minor Piano Quintet.
Brahms began work on the piece as a string quintet with two cellos, the same scoring as Schubert’s incomparable C major Quintet, in early 1862, and by August, he had the first three movements ready to send to his friend and mentor Clara Schumann. On September 3rd, she replied: “I do not know how to start telling you the great delight your Quintet has given me. I have played it over many times and I am full of it.” When she received the finale in December, she wrote, “I think the last movement rounds the whole thing off splendidly.... The work is a masterpiece.”
The violinist Joseph Joachim also received a copy of the new score from Brahms. At first he was enthusiastic, writing to the composer on November 5, 1862, “This piece of music is certainly of the greatest importance and is strong in character.” After playing through the Quintet several times over the ensuing six months, however, he had reservations about it. “The details of the work show some proof of overpowering strength,” he noted, “but what is lacking, to give me pure pleasure, is, in a word, charm. After a time, on hearing the work quietly, I think you will feel the same as I do about it.” Brahms tinkered with the score to satisfy Joachim’s objections, and had it played privately in Vienna, but decided that medium and music were still unhappily coupled.
By February 1863, the String Quintet had been recast as a Sonata for Two Pianos, which Brahms performed with Karl Tausig at a concert in Vienna on April 17, 1864. The premiere met with little critical favor. Clara continued to be delighted with the work’s musical substance, but thought that “it cannot be called a Sonata. Rather it is a work so full of ideas that it requires an orchestra for its interpretation. [These were the years before his First Symphony appeared, when Clara constantly encouraged Brahms to write something in that grand genre.] These ideas are for the most part lost on the piano. The first time I tried the work I had the feeling that it was an arrangement.... Please, remodel it once more!”
One final time, during the summer of 1864, Brahms revised the score, this time as a Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, an ensemble suggested to him by the conductor Hermann Levi. “The Quintet is beautiful beyond words,” Levi wrote. “You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece of chamber music.” The Quintet was published in 1865, and given its formal public premiere in Paris on March 24, 1868. Unlike the original strings-only version of the work, which he destroyed (Brahms was almost pathologically secretive about his sketches and unfinished works), he also allowed the Sonata for Two Pianos to be published in 1872, though not through normal channels but by Princess Anna von Hessen, to whom the score was dedicated.
The opening movement—tempestuous and tragic in mood, not unlike the D minor Piano Concerto, completed in 1859—is in a tightly packed sonata form. The dramatic main theme is stated immediately in unison by violin, cello and piano, and then repeated with greater force by the entire ensemble. The complementary theme, given in C-sharp minor above an insistently repeated triplet figuration, is more subdued and lyrical in nature than the previous melody. The closing theme achieves the brighter tonality of A-flat major to offer a brief respite from the movement’s pervasive strong emotions. The development section treats the main and second themes, and, also like the First Piano Concerto, ushers in the recapitulation on a great wave of sound.
The Schubertian strain rises closest to the surface in the tender second movement. The outer sections of the three-part form (A–B–A) are based on a gentle, lyrical strain in sweet, close-interval harmonies, while the movement’s central portion uses a melody incorporating an octave-leap motive.
The Scherzo is one of Brahms’ most electrifying essays. The Scherzo proper comprises three elements: a rising theme of vague rhythmic identity; a snapping motive in strict, dotted rhythm; and a march-like strain in full chordal harmony. These three components are juxtaposed throughout the movement, with the dotted-rhythm theme being given special prominence, including a vigorous fugal working-out. The central trio grows from a theme that is a lyrical transformation of the Scherzo’s chordal march strain.
The Finale opens with a pensive slow introduction fueled by deeply felt chromatic harmonies, exactly the sort of passage that caused Arnold Schoenberg to label Brahms a “modernist.” The body of the movement, in fast tempo, is a hybrid of rondo and sonata forms, a formal technique that finds its roots in the music of Haydn. Despite the buoyant flavor of the movement’s thematic material, the tragic tenor of this great Quintet is maintained until its closing page.
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