Chamber Music Sedona and the Sedona International Film Festival will join hands Wednesday, April 5, 4pm, during the Sedona Spring Music Festival at the Mary D. Fisher Theater, continuing its exploration of the world’s greatest violinists. The event will be hosted by CMS artistic director Bert Harclerode and Festival artists David Speltz and Connie Kupka.
“Here to Make Music” documents the career of violinist Pinchas Zukerman who continues to astound audiences and critics worldwide. The close friendship between Zukerman and the film’s director, Christopher Nupen, provides not only an interesting documentary, but also a touching immersion in the intimacy of one of the greatest violinist the world has ever known.
Pinchas Zukerman was born in Tel Aviv in 1948 with the gift from nature, polished by years of painstaking work. He came to America in 1962 where he studied at The Juilliard School. He was soon awarded the Medal of Arts, the Isaac Stern Award for Artistic Excellence and was appointed as the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative’s first instrumentalist mentor in the music discipline. Pinchas Zukerman’s extensive discography contains over 100 titles, and has earned him 2 Grammy awards and 21 nominations. His complete recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Philips were released in July 2016, in a 22-disc set spanning Baroque, Classical and Romantic concertos and chamber music.
Pinchas Zukerman has remained a phenomenon in the world of music for over four decades. His musical genius, prodigious technique and unwavering artistic standards are a marvel to audiences and critics. Devoted to the next generation of musicians, he has inspired younger artists with his magnetism and passion. His enthusiasm for teaching has resulted in innovative programs in London, New York, China, Israel and Ottawa. The name Pinchas Zukerman is equally respected as violinist, violist, conductor, pedagogue and chamber musician. The Los Angeles Times recently wrote, “Youth sticks with some people… Zukerman seems the forever-young virtuoso: expressively resourceful, infectiously musical, technically impeccable, effortless. As usual, it was a joy to be in his musical company.”
Through close relationships with the artists and by showing aspects of music and music-making that are not generally accessible, even to the concert-going public, Allegro™ Films and director Christopher Nupen has been able to produce a series of intimate portraits of great performers that have come to be recognized as classics and which have a longevity that is rarely achieved by television programming. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the much loved and respected Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, described Nupen’s work as being "At just about the highest level which television is capable of reaching".
Over the last decade, Pinchas Zukerman has become as equally regarded a conductor as he is an instrumentalist, leading many of the world's top ensembles in a wide variety of the orchestral repertoire's most demanding works. A devoted and innovative pedagogue, Mr. Zukerman chairs the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he has pioneered the use of distance-learning technology in the arts. In Canada, where he served as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra from 1999-2015, he established the NAC Institute for Orchestra Studies and the Summer Music Institute encompassing the Young Artists, Conductors and Composers Programs. He currently serves as Conductor Emeritus of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, as well as Artistic Director of its Young Artist Program.