Biography
Principal clarinet of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, four-time Grammy Award-winner Todd Levy has performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall, Mostly Mozart, with the Israel Philharmonic, and at the White House, among many other venues. An active chamber musician, Levy has appeared with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, Ying, Miro, and Miami string quartets, and with James Levine, Christoph Eschenbach, and Mitsuko Uchida. He has also been a participant at the Marlboro Music Festival for four summers and was a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Aspen Wind Quintet.
In demand as guest principal clarinet with the top American orchestras, Levy has played principal clarinet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and frequently for Seiji Ozawa and Riccardo Muti in Japan with Tokyo Opera Nomori and the Mito Chamber Orchestra. An avid supporter of new music, he has performed world premieres of concerti and chamber works by composers such as John Harbison, Joan Tower, Peter Schickele, Paquito D’Rivera, Morton Subotnick, Magnus Lindberg, Marc Neikrug, and Outi Tarkiainen. He performs on the new release of Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses with violinist Pinchas Zukerman, actor John Rubenstein, and the composer conducting.
Levy’s new CD for Avie, Rhapsodie, features 20th-century classics for clarinet. He has also recorded the Brahms clarinet sonatas and Schumann’s romances and Fantasiestücke for Avie, as well as three educational CDs of clarinet competition works entitled The Clarinet Collection for G. Schirmer and Hal Leonard. In 2021, he compiled a book of French repertoire for publisher Alphonse Leduc called French Music for Clarinet. In addition, Levy has recorded and edited the new exclusive editions and CDs of the Bernstein clarinet sonata and Gerald Finzi’s five bagatelles for Boosey and Hawkes in addition to more than 20 other orchestral and chamber music CDs on the Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, and Decca labels. He performs on Vandoren reeds, mouthpieces, and ligatures, and Selmer Signature clarinets. Levy serves on the clarinet faculty at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and at UW-Milwaukee. Levy is a graduate of The Juilliard School and an alum of the New World Symphony.
SPECIALTIES:
Tone production
Legato playing
Articulation
Audition preparation
LANGUAGES:
English
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