Jay Campbell

The American cellist Jay Campbell is an “artiste étoile” of the 2017 Summer Festival. He was born in 1989 in Berkeley, California, and studied at the Juilliard School in New York. His repertoire ranges from early music to contemporary works. A significant part of his formation took place at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY, which he attended in the summers of  2010 and 2011; he performed here as a soloist in Boulez’s Messagesquisse and Pli selon pli under the direction of the composer himself. Campbell received the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2016. In the same year he was engaged by the New York Philharmonic, with whom he made his debut in 2013, as curator of the Ligeti Forward series, which he designed together with the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI for the NY Phil Biennial; as part of this series, he performed György Ligeti’s Cello Concerto under the direction of Alan Gilbert. Campbell has collaborated with such composers as Elliott Carter, Matthias Pintscher, and Kaija Saariaho, as well as with many others from his own generation. John Zorn has written more than a dozen works for him, including The Aristos, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated score; it was included on the release Hen to Pan, listed as one of the New York Times’s Best Recordings of 2015. Jay Campbell has concertized at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California; the Krannert Center in Illinois; the Marlboro Festival; Chamber Music Northwest; the Moab Music Festival; and the Heidelberger Frühling. He is a member of the JACK Quartet and the cellist of a new piano trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao.

August 2017