Valentin Garvie premieres “Contrafactum” at UT

During his 2023 US visit Valentin Garvie will offer a concert of new music for trumpet and trumpet and electronics. 

Valentin Garvie is an internationally renown trumpet soloist/composer who straddles the worlds of Classical, Contemporary Music and Jazz in a versatile and original way.

He studied Orchestral Conducting at Universidad Católica Argentina in Buenos Aires whilst studying trumpet with Rafael Morelli and composition with Marcelo Perticone. He then pursued a Postgraduate Performance Course in Trumpet at the Royal Academy of Music in London with teachers John Wallace and Howard Snell.

From 2002 to 2017 he held the trumpet position at the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, working and collaborating with the main composers and conductors of our times including Pierre Boulez, Beat Furrer, George Benjamin, Helmut Lachenmann, etc.

He has been invited by symphony orchestras such as Hessischer Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchester , the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. He has been a member of ensembles such as Worldbrass and Banda Antix and has performed Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Nr 2 with many chamber orchestras around Europe.

Valentin is also very active as a jazz soloist . He was a member of Hessischer Rundfunk Jazz Ensemble as a composer/instrumentalist and continues to play with many important figures of the german jazz scene. In 2015 he was awarded the Hessischer Jazz Preis.

In 2017 he relocated to Mar del Plata, Argentina where he continues to develop his career as a soloist, chamber musician, jazz soloist, composer and educator.

He was awarded the “Konex” prize for his role as an outstanding wind player of Argentina in the decade 2009-2019.

He is increasingly active as a composer and leader of collaborative projects. In May 2019 during a residency in Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires he lead a collaborative adapation of Bernd Alois Zimmerman ´s Trumpet Concerto and Alvin Curran ´s Fakebook. The last of which he has also coordinated as artistic director with the Ensemble Modern. He has performed with various symphony orchestras his composition “Cuatro piezas para trompeta y orquesta”. In 2020 he coordinated/lead a project based on the work of composer Gerardo Gandini in the Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón. He has recently premiered his “Concierto” (versión para trompeta, saxo y gran órgano) at the main hall of Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires in march 2022. 

About the piece: Contrafactum is based on a bicinia by Orlando de Lassus. Similar to a a jazz contrafact, Contrafactum evolves after a reestablished framework. 

The composition is for two trumpets, the artists for the premiere will be Valentin Garvie and Arthur Zanin. 

Fuego y Duende premieres on Feb. 26 in NC

Cellist Ashlee Booth and violist Cameron Rehberg will premiere “Fuego y Duende” on February 26th @ 4PM at Acoustic Corner in NC.

About the piece:

Fuego y duende is a composition about the unrelenting search that fuels music in all its forms. At its root, the need for music comes from an inexplicable desire to find something indescribable. Music is a constant search. In García Lorca’s words “…there are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned…”

About the performers:

Ashlee Booth (b.1993, West Palm Beach, FL) is a native Floridian and freelance cellist currently residing in Asheville, North Carolina where she teaches orchestra in the Buncombe County Schools.

Ashlee is a classically trained cellist who specializes in contemporary music. Ashlee has performed with the local contemporary music organization nief-norf in their Knoxville Concert Series and at the Big Ears Festival. During the summer of 2018, Ashlee appeared as a Performance Fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and in residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute with “Two-Way Street” and composer, Sarah Hennies.

Ashlee was the winner of the 2017 Concerto Competition at the University of Tennessee and performed the first movement of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto with the UTSO. She has appeared in masterclasses for artists such as Joel Krosnick, Desmond Hoebig, Collin Carr, Amit Paled, and the Dali String Quartet.

Her musical career extends beyond the stage. She is a registered teacher with the Suzuki Associations of America and received Book 1 training with Dr. Melissa Kraut. Ashlee is passionate about sharing her love of music and encouraging creativity in young students through her teaching. She is currently the Strings Teacher in the Buncombe County Schools and is the cello instructor at Bill Jones Music School, where she teaches private lessons and leads a biweekly improvisation group class. She has appeared as Guest Artist Faculty at the 2019 Tennessee Cello Workshop and at the Community Cello Works in Blacksb
urg, Virginia.

Ashlee strives to give her students a culturally responsible education. Her orchestra students are not only taught the fundamentals of musicality,
 but a wide range of musical styles, perspectives, and with an emphasis on relating music to the world around them.

Ashlee received her Bachelor’s degree from Florida State University where she studied with Greg Sauer. In 2018 Ashlee completed her MM and her work as the Graduate Teaching Assistant for Dr. Wesley Baldwin at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.