Visiting Artists: Lawrence Stomberg & Ketty Nez

The Colorado College Music Department welcomes visiting artists Lawrence Stomberg, cello, and Ketty Nez, piano, for a performance beginning at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 9 in Packard Performance Hall.

Admission is free and open to the public. The program includes works by Janácek, Frolyak, Bánkövi, Dohnányi, as well as compositions by Nez and CC Music Department co-chair Ofer Ben-Amots.

About Ketty Nez:

Ketty Nez joined the composition and theory department at the Boston University School of Music in 2005, after teaching for two years at the University of Iowa. Listen to a Wonder Never Heard Before!, her portrait CD as composer/pianist, was released in 2010 by Albany Records. Her folk opera, The Fiddler and the Old Woman of Rumelia, was premiered in a staged version in May 2012, by Juventas New Music Ensemble. Her piano concerto thresholds, performed by Ketty and the Boston University Wind Ensemble, was released in July 2013 by Ravello Records. BUWE also recorded four scenes for Juliet, released February 2019 by Summit Records. double images, a CD of folk-based chamber music, was released by Albany Records in May 2020.

Current projects include collaborations with cellist Lawrence Stomberg. During the fall term of 2021, Ketty was a guest teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary, as a Fulbright scholar. Ketty completed, in 2002-3, a residence of several months at the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Montbeliard, France, prior to the premiere of her chamber opera An Opera in Devolution: Drama in 540 Seconds, at the 2003 Seventh Festival A*Devantgarde in Munich. In 2001, she spent several months as visiting composer/scholar at Stanford University\’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and in 1998 participated in the year-long computer music course at the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Before computer music studies, Ketty worked for two years with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam, and co-founded the international contemporary music collective Concerten Tot and Met. She spent a year studying with composer Michio Mamiya in Tokyo before her graduate work, and her music has been performed in festivals in Europe, North America, and Asia. Ketty holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at Berkeley, a master\’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, a bachelor\’s degree in piano performance from the Curtis Institute of Music, and a bachelor\’s degree in psychology from Bryn Mawr College.

About Lawrence Stomberg:

Cellist Lawrence Stomberg enjoys a varied career of performance as soloist and chamber musician, pedagogue, and in community outreach through music. Hailed for “style and elegance” and “drama and rhetoric” (Strings Magazine), and “lyrical yet impassioned interpretation” (Fanfare Magazine), he has been a featured performer at the Eastern Music Festival and Texas Music Festival, and Serafin Summer Music and Master Players Festival, and performs annually at the Techne Music Festival. Currently a member of the Philadelphia-based mixed ensemble, The Halcyon Consort, he served thirteen years as the cellist of the acclaimed Serafin String Quartet, having toured around the United States. Stomberg is invested in presenting the music of the old masters, including recent performances of the cycle of the six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello of J.S. Bach and the complete Cello and Piano works of Beethoven, as well as bringing new works and compositional voices to life, with recent and upcoming premiers and commissions of solo, sonata, chamber, and concerto works by composers Kirk O’Riordan, David Osbon, Richard Prior, Mazz Swift, Alisa Rose, and Ketty Nez. Concerts have taken him across four continents, with recent solo and chamber music performances in the cities of London, Vienna, Bogotá, as well as across the United States. He has recorded for the Centaur, Naxos, Albany, Ravello, and VAI labels.

As a recipient of the 2018 Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellowship, Stomberg turned much his performance activity to musical outreach and community engagement through his project, Bach in Wilmington, which paired the six Suites for Solo Cello of J.S. Bach with recorded interviews of residents of Wilmington, Delaware (his current home), and commissioned works responding both to Bach and Wilmington, by violinists and crossover artists Mazz Swift and Alisa Rose. This work continues, with continuing performance and teaching artist appearances in community centers, churches, food pantries, and re-entry programs around the city, and an upcoming online video series.

Stomberg is a busy and dedicated pedagogue, having served on the faculties at Truman State University in Missouri and Oklahoma State University before joining the music faculty at the University of Delaware School of Music in 2004, where he is currently Professor of Cello and Associate Director for Performance Studies. He is a frequent guest at schools across the United States and abroad giving cello and chamber music masterclasses, and finds the work of teaching a vital companion to that of performing.

Stomberg lives in Wilmington, Delaware with his wife, cellist and pedagogue Jennifer Crowell Stomberg. They have three adult children, as well as an animal menagerie of three cats, a dog, and a turtle.