AmBul Festival of American and Bulgarian Music
GUEST ARTISTS
NINA ASSIMAKOPOULOS is Assistant Professor of Flute at the Bowling Green State University College of Musical Arts, where she has taught since 2004, and is active as a concert soloist, recording artist and master class facilitator. She was educated at the Indiana University School of Music and Munich Academy of Music, studying with Peter Lloyd and Paul Meisen, respectively. She has performed as principal flute with the Munich City Opera and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Academy Orchestra, as well as concerts and radio broadcasts which have won international public and critical acclaim. Solo performances include her New York solo debut at Carnegie Hall, The Alden Theater “Rising Stars” Concert Series in Washington, D.C., the “Dame Myra Hess Radio Broadcast Concert Series” in Chicago and the “Live from Hochstein” radio broadcast concert series in Rochester, New York. The recipient of two Fulbright Grants, the National Society of Arts and Letters Career Award, the Yehudi Menuhin Chamber Music Endowment, and the Aaron Copland Fund Grant, her significant theme-based commissioning and multi-media performance projects have led her to commission, premiere, and record the works of over 40 contemporary composers. Her solo recordings include Flute Impressions and Arcadian Murmurs on the Euterpe Label and Points of Entry, Works for Solo Flue by American Women Composers, Vol. I and Vol.II on Capstone Records. In addition to her work as a musician, Assimakopoulos is a prize-winning painter whose work has been exhibited at museums and in internationally juried shows.
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SUSAN BROWNFIELD is an Honors graduate of the University of Oregon School of Music, earning her B.M. degree as a student of Milagro Vargas. She completed her M.M. degree at Boston’s New England Conservatory, studying under the renowned Helen Hodam. A District Winner in the 2001 Metropolitan Opera Competition, she subsequently portrayed the role of Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme with the Harvard Lowell Opera. She performed the role of Young Liza with Boston Academy of Music Opera in Weill’s Lady in the Dark, and was Lucy in Boston Vocal Artists’ inaugural production of Menotti’s The Telephone. Other performed roles include Liat in Hammerstein’s South Pacific, Isabelle/Madeline in Mollicone’s Face on the Barroom Floor, and Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and most recently she was heard as Rose in Maine Grand Opera’s production of Weill’s Street Scene. Theatre credits include the National Broadway Tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Ms. Brownfield subsequently starred as Tuptim in the same production at New York’s Westchester Broadway Theatre and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Carbonell Award in 2002 for her reprisal of this role at the renowned Actor’s Playhouse in Miami. In addition to performing the role of Sonia for the world premiere of Jeremy Conley’s Crime and Punishment, she was the soloist in the Boston premiere of Richard Danielpour’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” directed by John Heiss with the New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble. Ms. Brownfield returned to her birth country of Vietnam in the Fall of 1997 as a special guest of the Vietnamese Ambassador to the United Nations, performing concerts and presenting master classes at the National Conservatories in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi during a three-week tour of the country.
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STEFANIA DE KENESSEY was born in Budapest of mixed parentage (her mother is originally from Medovina, Bulgaria) and came to the United States as a child. After early training as a pianist, her musical education culminated in a doctorate in composition from Princeton University, where her principal teacher was Milton Babbitt. Honored repeatedly with awards from ASCAP (most recently in 2008), her music has been heard on four continents and includes chamber music, concertos, opera and smaller vocal works, all composed in a highly accessible tonal idiom. Her operas The Monster Bed, a comedy, and The Other Wise Man, a holiday fable, were premiered by the Mannes Opera in 1998. The Other Wise Man was subsequently performed by the Singapore Symphony in 2000. Featured in a PBS documentary on the return of classicism in the arts, she is the founder and artistic director of The Derriere Guard, an alliance of traditionalist contemporary artists, architects, poets, and composers, and is also the founding president of the International Alliance for Women in Music. She is a professor of music and chairs the Arts department at the New School's Eugene Lang College in New York City.
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CLARINET QUINTET OF THE US AIR FORCE IN EUROPE
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