The musicians of the Concord Chamber Music Society are acclaimed chamber ensembles and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the clarinetist, Thomas Martin, is the BSO’s Associate Principal Clarinetist. Today we thought it would be fun for you to get to know Thomas Martin!

Thomas Martin is associate principal clarinetist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal clarinetist of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Mr. Martin began his professional music career as a clarinetist, saxophonist, and flutist at age thirteen, performing with several big bands and combos in his native Wisconsin. He later attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where his clarinet studies were with Stanley Hasty and former Boston Symphony clarinetist Peter Hadcock. Through his association with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops, Mr. Martin has worked with most of the world’s leading conductors, soloists, and entertainers. Outside of these two orchestras, he maintains an active schedule as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. His performance of the east coast premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto at Tanglewood in 1998 was highly praised, and he played that work again at Tanglewood in 2008 as part of that summer’s Carter Centenary Celebration. His performances with the Boston Pops included a 100th anniversary tribute to Benny Goodman in June 2009; he gave the American premiere of Carter’s Poems of Louis Zukofsky with soprano Lucy Shelton as part of the 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood; and he appeared as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in August 2010 performing Leonard Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs for clarinet and jazz ensemble with Robert Spano conducting. In May 2010 he performed with the Hawthorne String Quartet at the Prague Spring Music Festival, where he also gave the premiere of a new clarinet sonata composed for him by Sir André Previn, with the composer at the piano.

Brubeck, Gandolfi and Foss
RR-122

The prestigious Concord Chamber Music Society, featuring musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, mark their debut on Reference Recordings with two premiere recordings. These new works by Chris Brubeck and Michael Gandolfi, two of America’s most-commissioned composers, are both accessible and adventurous. Rounding out the program, the Lukas Foss duo for violin and piano, Central Park Reel, hints cheerfully at a kind of musical twin bill. “Central Park” suggests a scene in New York but “Reel” hints at a characteristic dance often accompanied by a bluegrass band. Grammy award winning engineer “Prof.” Keith Johnson did an outstanding job of recording this music in the superb natural acoustics of Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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