About The Trio
The American Chamber Trio was acclaimed by The New York Times as “sensitive and persuasive artists” and has appeared nationally and internationally for over two decades. In addition to three appearances at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., they have performed for chamber music societies, museums and universities throughout the United States. They have toured internationally to South America and the Far East, under the auspices of the United States State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Culture, most recently a five-concert tour of China, with performances in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. In New York they have played at Alice Tully Hall, have given four series of concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall and have presented retrospectives of music by Brahms, Beethoven, Ravel, Ives and Bartok. In 1997, they presented the complete trios of Brahms in New York, recorded them for HM records and edited them for International Music Company. The Trio was recently appointed Chamber Ensemble-In-Residence at Valparaiso University.
June DeForest
June DeForest joined Valparaiso University's violin faculty in 1991, after serving as the Drushel Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Over the last several years, four of her students represented the state of Indiana in The Music Teachers National Association's national competition. As a founding member of The American Chamber Trio, she has performed nationally and internationally for over two decades. In addition to three appearances at the National Gallery, she has performed for chamber music societies, museums, and universities throughout the United States. She has toured internationally to South America and the Far East under the auspices of the United States State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Culture, with performances in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Bogotá, and Sao Paolo. In addition to performing on recitals at Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, she took part in a retrospective of the music of Maurice Ravel at Alliance Francais performing both violin sonatas and his piano trio. At Cooper Union she performed the Bartok Contrast s for the 100th Aniversary of Bartok's Birth. Her performances of Charles Ives' Second Sonata and his trio at the National Gallery was praised as "first rate" in the Washington Post. Peter G. Davis in his New York Times review of her performance of the Kodaly duo said it was "distinguished by technical polish and keen musical understanding." In 1997 she performed the complete Brahms trios with the American Chamber Trio at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, and recorded them for HM Records. Ms. DeForest edited the violin parts of the Brahms Trios for the International Music Company for worldwide distribution. She is currently under contract to produce a violin adaptation of Practice for Performance, a treatise on musical preparation for Mel Bay Publications, Inc. Her recordings include trios by Brahms, Beethoven, Ravel, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky as well as a recording of Violin and Cello Duos by Kodaly and Ravel.
Ms. DeForest has enjoyed a distinguished career as an orchestral player serving as Concertmaster of the Joffrey Ballet and the Canadian Opera Company and long tenures in the first violin sections of the orchestras of the Chicago Lyric Opera and the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. She holds a B.M and M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music where she studied with Raphael Bronstien. She also studied with David Nadian, a concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and Sydney Harth, concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Daniel Morganstern
Mr. Morganstern has served as solo cellist for two of America’s most prestigious organizations, the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, for over three decades. He has also been principal cellist of the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the American National Opera Company, Joffrey Ballet, and the orchestra of The Dartmouth Congregation of the Arts. He has performed virtually every major cello solo from the opera and ballet repertoire with such stars as Pavarotti, Domingo, Sutherland, Ramey, Fleming, Baryshnikov, Makavora, and Nureyev on national radio and television broadcasts. International Music Company has published his edition of twenty-eight of these solos for world wide distribution.
His New York recitals have included three at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, five at Carnegie Recital Hall, two concerts broadcast live over WNYC from the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with the noted pianists Richard Goode and Ursula Oppens and recitals at the Lincoln Center Library and the New York Cultural Center. Donal Henahan, chief critic for the New York Times, hailed him as a “first rate cellist” and commented “not many modestly heralded concerts in the season proved as satisfying as this one in musicianship, ensemble coordination and grasp of style.” Peter G. Davis, in addition to lauding his “warm sweet tone, sophisticated sense of lyrical expansion and command of delicate color effects,” said “Daniel Morganstern brought some unusual interpretive thoughts to his largely tried-and-true cello favorites Saturday night in Tully Hall. Often his individual approach did bear fruit” in his New York Times Review. In collaboration with pianist Eric Larsen he presented the complete works for cello and piano of Ludwig Van Beethoven at Carnegie Recital Hall. Bernard Holland commented in the New York Times “so rewarding was Saturday’s evening of piano and cello music that one regretted missing its companion concert a week before. Rarely is this music allowed to speak in such a natural buoyant voice.” As soloist with orchestra he has played the concertos of Dvorak, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Boccherini, Beethoven and Brahms. As a member of The American Chamber Trio, he has appeared nationally and internationally for over two decades. In addition to three appearances at the national Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he has performed for chamber music societies, museums and universities throughout the United States. He has toured internationally to South America and the Far East, under the auspices of the United States Department and Chinese Ministry of Culture with performances in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Bogotá, and Sao Paolo.
Publications include Fundamentals of Cello Technique and Musical Interpretation, Cello Solos from Opera and Ballet, a new addition of the Tchaikovsky Variations on a Rococo Theme, and the cello parts to the three Brahms trios by International Music Company New York.. His treatise Practice for Performance is published by Mel Bay Publications, Inc. and his articles can be found in The Instrumentalist. His recordings include sonatas by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Schubert, trios by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and Shostakovich and duos of Kodaly and Ravel. Videos include sonatas by Fancoeur, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff and trios by Ravel and Schumann. All are in collaboration with his long time partners Eric Larsen and June DeForest.
Eric Larsen
American pianist Eric Larsen has established himself as one of the most versatile artists of his generation. He tours regularly in Russia, Europe, Asia and throughout the United States. He has played extensively in the Middle East, South America and the Scandinavian countries where his research of the Edvard Grieg Manuscript Collection in the Bergen Bibliotek (Norway) was generously supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle and Andrew Mellon Foundations. Having performed in all the major New York concert halls, he is best-known in New York for his retrospective concerts of Beethoven, Brahms and Ravel. He is in demand internationally for both solo piano and chamber music master classes and has been on the jury of numerous American and European international piano competitions. He has been involved with the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, the American String Teachers Association and the National Convention of the Music Teachers Association as both a panelist and a performer.
Mr. Larsen has been active in commissioning and premiering many new American works and has recorded for Equilibrium, New World Records, Bay Cities Records, Albany, Citadel and HM Productions (USA), Melodiya and Russian Disk (Russia), and the Hessisches Rundfunk (Germany). He has recorded a new work by North Carolina composer Robert Ward in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. In addition to his solo performances, Mr. Larsen appears regularly with the Meadowmount Trio with whom he has recorded Dvorak Trios, Turina Piano Chamber Music, Chausson Concerto and Trio and a CD of American Chamber Music. He has also recorded the Complete Brahms Trios with the American Chamber Trio, the Complete Works for Violin and Piano by Arthur Foote with Kevin Lawrence and Beethoven Sonatas for Cello and Piano with Daniel Morganstern. Mr. Larsen has been engaged by the International Music Company of New York to edit the three Brahms Piano Trios, the first (Op. 101) was published in June 2002 and won a Paul Revere Award; the second (Op. 8) was published in October 2003.
As a teacher at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Mr. Larsen has enjoyed considerable success in the studio. In the past few years alone his students have appeared with such groups as the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony of Taiwan, the Ukraine National Symphony, the Russian Federation Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. His students have traveled with him on three occasions to Russia for concerts, master classes and radio recordings in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tombov. They have been invited to compete in the Van Cliburn (USA), Rubinstein (Israel), Leeds (England) and Cleveland International Piano Competitions and have won major prizes in the Unisa-Pretoria (South Africa), Busoni International (Italy), Casagrande International (Italy), Ibla Grand Prize (Italy), A.M.A. Calabria (Italy), the International Bach (Germany), Cincinnati World (USA), Bartok-Kabalevsky International (USA), Josef Hofmann (USA), the New Orleans International and the Alabama International (USA) piano competitions.
Mr. Larsen received his B.M. with Distinction from the University of Wisconsin. Upon his graduation from the Manhattan School of Music he was appointed to the artist-faculty of the North Carolina School of the Arts. He was the recipient of the North Carolina School of the Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching in the year 2000. Mr. Larsen is also on the summer faculty of the Meadowmount School of Music in New York. His teachers include Dora Zaslavsky, Artur Balsam and Carroll Chilton (USA), Pierre Sancan (Paris), and Benjamin Kaplan (London).