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FEATURED MUSICIANS BIOS

Marc Moskovitz, cello
The Barbara Trueman Chair

The son of a professional violinist, the musical path of cellist Marc Moskovitz has taken him from North Carolina to Indiana, Berlin, Virginia, Ohio, Boston and finally back to North Carolina. He has held positions at The University of Virginia and The University of Toledo, where he served as associate professor of cello and cellist of the Toledo Trio. In 2001, Marc moved to Boston, where he performed with some of the city’s most venerable music organizations, among them The Boston Pops and The Handel and Haydn Society, both of with which he toured, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with which he frequently recorded. As co-founder and cellist of Montage Music Society, he gave the North American premiere of Zemlinsky’s rediscovered Cello Sonata at the Library of Congress, which the Washington Post called “an impassioned performance.” His recordings include the music of cello virtuosi David Popper and Alfredo Piatti, both on the VAI label, and premiere recordings of music of Franz Reizenstein and Eric Zeisl (ASV). Marc has also performed as a guest of the International Piatti Festival in Bergamo, Italy. In addition to his work as principal cellist of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, he performs regularly with the North Carolina Symphony and is founder of the Trinity Park Salon Series, a house music concert series in Durham, NC. A former student of cellists Janos Starker and Gary Hoffman, Marc holds a doctorate and master’s degree from Indiana University and spent one year in Berlin with cellist Wolfgang Boettcher as a Fulbright scholar.

A committed scholar, Marc has written on a variety of musical subjects and for various music journals. He is the author of Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony and co-author of Beethoven’s Cello: Five Revolutionary Sonatas and Their World, both published by Boydell & Brewer (UK). In addition to writing the program notes for the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Marc has provided program notes for orchestras and opera houses in Germany, Spain and China as well as the U.S, and liner notes for the Melba and Naxos record labels. His entries on historical cellists are found in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

When in Columbus, Marc performs on a cello owned by Catherine Adams. The instrument was owned and played by her great-grandfather, a professional cellist-turned-homesteader, who immigrated to America after serving in the court of the King of Hanover.

Larry Todd, piano

R. Larry Todd is Arts & Sciences Professor of Music and former chair of the Music Department at Duke University. Among his books are Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford University Press), named best biography of 2003 by the Association of American Publishers, and described in the New York Review of Books as “likely to be the standard biography for a long time to come.” A German translation, which appeared in 2008 from Reclam/Carus Verlag as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Sein Leben, seine Musik, was awarded a Deutscher Musikeditionspreis. He is a former fellow of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Humanities Center. His biography of Fanny Hensel, titled Fanny Hensel, the Other Mendelssohn, appeared from Oxford University Press and was awarded the Nicholas Slonimsky Prize from ASCAP in New York. He has published widely about the Mendelssohns, and also articles on subjects ranging from Obrecht and Haydn to Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Webern. He serves as general editor of the Master Musician Series for Oxford University Press and the Routledge Studies in Musical Genres. A graduate of Yale University, where he received his Ph.D., he studied piano at the Yale School of Music and with the late Lilian Kallir. His recording with Nancy Green of the complete cello and piano works of Mendelssohn and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel appeared from JRI Recordings in 2013. Among his recent releases are the documentary/performance “Exploring Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas” with Nancy Green, Discovering Music (Oxford University Press), and, with Marc Moskovitz, Beethoven’s Cello: Five Revolutionary Sonatas and Their World (Boydell & Brewer), the first English monograph devoted to Beethoven’s cello music.