Susan Babini, Cello
A winner of Astral Artists’ 2007 National Auditions, cellist Susan Babini has performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Astral presented the active soloist and chamber musician in her Philadelphia recital debut on its concert series this season. In the 2009-2010 season Astral features her on its “Rising Stars” concert at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, in Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field for Cello and Orchestra, in its Philadelphia Brahms Festival, and in a program of piano trios. The Philadelphia Inquirer has praised Ms. Babini’s “gorgeous sound” and “liquid sense of phrasing,” and calls her “very individual and refined.” She has been presented by Artists International and the Violoncello Society of New York, and has appeared in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. She was also a recent participant at the Marlboro Music Festival. In 2005 she appeared as both Guest Principal Cellist and soloist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, performing Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante under Roy Goodman. As a winner of the San Francisco Conservatory’s concerto competition, she performed Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo with the Conservatory Orchestra.
Ms. Babini has toured with the Mark Morris Dance Company. She also toured Central Asia as a member of the Phoenix String Quartet, under the auspices of Carnegie Hall and the U.S. Department of State. She has performed and taught throughout Panama as part of the Tres Americas Project, and participated at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Italy’s Spoleto Festival, and at the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, Delaware, and Kneisel Hall chamber music festivals, as well as in Germany’s Kronberg masterclasses. She has collaborated with such artists as Bernard Greenhouse, Gilbert Kalish, Manahem Pressler, Joseph Silverstein, Mistuko Uchida, and Donald Weilerstein, and performs as a member of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recently presented Ms. Babini in “Musicians from Marlboro.” This summer she returned to Marlboro, appears at the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, and performs Brahms’s B Major Piano Trio and Schumann’s Piano Quartet at the Aspen Music Festival with Anne-Marie McDermott and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.
Ms. Babini received both a Bachelor and a Master of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a graduate diploma from The Juilliard School, where she was assistant to Bonnie Hampton.