Music in the City is back in the Trustmark Grand Hall. Join us at the Museum for a Friday evening of delight with the sounds of this French horn and flutist duo.
Performers:
Elise Blatchford: Praised by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for her “superb command of color and nuance,” Elise Blatchford is the Associate Professor of Flute at the University of Memphis Scheidt School of Music.
A chamber musician, soloist, orchestral musician, and teacher, Ms. Blatchford is a flutist who embraces the independent, the experimental, and the DIY. As a founding member of the new music woodwind quintet The City of Tomorrow, Ms. Blatchford won first prize at the 2011 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and received a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning grant in 2014. The quintet tours nationally and was in residence at Tufts University in Boston in February 2019. Ms. Blatchford has appeared with the International Contemporary Ensemble in New York and at the Banff Centre for Creativity in Alberta, Canada.
As a recitalist, Ms. Blatchford frequently programs music of the 20th and 21st centuries and has been an invited guest at venues across the U.S., including Yale, Indiana University, University of Oregon, and Virginia Tech. In 2019-20, she performed recitals at the Buffet-Crampon showroom in New York City and on the Dame Myra Hess Series at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Also at home in the traditional orchestra world, Ms. Blatchford served as Principal Flute for the Memphis Symphony Orchestra’s 2018-19 season. She has performed with the Oregon Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, IRIS Orchestra, and the YOA Orchestra of the Americas. With YOA, she toured extensively throughout South America, the Caribbean, and mainland China, made an appearance at Carnegie Hall with Valery Gergiev, and recorded with Philip Glass.
Leander Star
The versatile and adventurous French hornist Leander Star leads a multi-dimensional career in multiple time zones. Based in Memphis, Tennessee, he is on faculty at Rhodes College and the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he has the pleasure of teaching horn in the shadow of William Faulkner. In the Mid-South region, he is a regular performer with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, IRIS Orchestra, and the Arkansas Symphony.
Further afield, Leander tours with the New York-based avant-garde wind quintet The City of Tomorrow, a group that won the 2011 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. In June 2021, the ensemble’s second album, Blow, featuring works by Franco Donatoni, Hannah Lash, and Esa Pekka Salonen was released by New Focus Records. Leander’s “beautiful phrasing and effortless agility” were noted in a review by the Horn Call.
A Portland, Oregon native, Leander is a tenured member of the Oregon Ballet Theater and Portland Opera Orchestra and can often be found performing in the pit at the Keller Auditorium and in other venues in the Northwest. As an artist who prioritizes living composers, Leander commissioned and premiered a new work by Seattle composer Nat Evans at the 2015 Northwest Horn Symposium called How to Stay Dry in Western Oregon, based on Nat’s experiences and field recordings while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Leander has performed Fantasie for Horns II by Vancouver composer Hildegarde Westerkamp all over the United States, including performances in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Tennessee, and New York City. In 2022, he will give the Southeast regional premiere of David Byrd Marrow’s “Meditations Volume 1” for Solo Horn.
