Karen Bentley Pollick, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine & Gottfried Rabl
Biographie Karen Bentley Pollick, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine & Gottfried Rabl
Karen Bentley Pollick
is one of America’s leading contemporary musicians, performing a wide range of solo repertoire and styles on violin, viola, piano and Norwegian hardangerfele to extend the boundaries of the concert experience from the Baroque to cutting edge contemporary music and live improvisations. A native of Palo Alto, California, she began piano lessons at age 5 with Armenian pianist Rusana Sysoyev, studied with Camilla Wicks in San Francisco, and with Yuval Yaron, Josef Gingold and Rostislav Dubinsky at Indiana University, where she received both Bachelors and Masters of Music Degrees in Violin Performance with a cognate in Choral Conducting. She performed in master classes of Nathan Milstein in Zurich, Jean-Jacques Kantorow in Victoria, B.C., and Glenn Dicterow in Carmel, CA. Her recordings of original music include Electric Diamond, Angel, Konzerto and Succubus and Ariel View, for which she has received three music awards from Just Plain Folks, including Best Instrumental Album and Best Song. On her own record label Ariel Ventures she has produced chamber music featuring works by Russian pianist/composer Ivan Sokolov on
Concertmaster of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie Kammerorchester and the New York String Orchestra, Karen has also participated in the June in Buffalo and Wellesley Composers Conferences, and the Olympic Music, Tanglewood, Amelia Island, Next Generation, Canberra, Permainu Muzika, and Bowling Green State Contemporary Music Festivals. She has toured with the New York Philharmonic, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Erick Hawkins Dance Company, the Bolshoi Ballet and Barbra Streisand, and has recorded with the Dave Matthews Band and Evanescence as well as numerous film scores at Skywalker Ranch. She was a guest artist with the contemporary music group Opus Posthumous from Moscow, Seattle Chamber Players in their Icebreaker II: Baltic Voices Festival, and Ensemble for the Romantic Century in New York.
She premiered Swedish composer Ole Saxe’s Dance Suite for Violin and Orchestra with Redwood Symphony and has performed concertos with the Alabama Symphony and orchestras in Panama, Russia, Alaska, New York, California, Lithuania and Ukraine. Karen has presented recitals with Ivan Sokolov at the American Academy of Rome, Seattle, New York City, Alabama, Louisiana and Colorado and throughout the Czech Republic; with cellist Dennis Parker at the American Spring Festival in Brno; and in England at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival where she gave the UK premiere of David Felder’s Another Face for violin solo with Delcom video walls. Along with choreographer Teri Weksler and percussionist John Scalici, she received a Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham 2008 Interdisciplinary Grant to Individual Artists towards the creation of Quips and Cranks. Karen was awarded a grant from the Alabama State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts for her March 2010 Solo Violin and Alternating Currents concerts including the premiere of Metaman by Charles Norman Mason in Birmingham, Seattle and at Music Olomouc 2011. She launched Violin, Viola & Video Virtuosity with New York video artist Sheri Wills in April 2012 at Evergroove Studio and has since performed the program featuring dozens of videos projected onto the violinist in Brooklyn, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Klaipeda, New York, Bucharest, and Stanford. With the Paul Dresher Double Duo she toured Australia in May 2013 and the US in fall 2014 and has performed with the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Ensemble since 1999.
While residing in Vilnius, Lithuania she debuted Resonances from Vilna with pianist Jascha Nemtsov in May 2014, Nothing is Forever with actor Aiste Ptakauske in December 2015, and premiered David A. Jaffe’s violin concerto How Did It Get So Late So Soon? with the Lithuanian National Opera & Ballet Theatre Orchestra with Maestro Robertas Šervenikas in August 2016.
Karen received a Seed Money Grant for Disseminated Performances from New York Women Composers towards solo concerts with electronics at Wayward Music Series in Seattle, Stanford University’s CCRMA, CINETic and George Enescu Museum in Bucharest, and Female Composers Festival at SPECTRUMNYC in spring 2018. She is represented on two tracks of Dorothy Hindman’s Tightly Wound, released on Innova and winner of #1 Gold Medal in the Fall 2017 Global Music Awards. In June 2018 she recorded the two violin concerti of Hermann Graedener for Toccata Classics with Viennese conductor Gottfried Rabl and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. Pollick currently serves as concertmaster of Valse Café Orchestra in Seattle, and Principal Second Violin and Festival Artist with the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra in Boulder. Karen performs on a violin made by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume in 1860 and a viola made in 1987 by William Whedbee. ...
