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KENNETH SLOWIK, conductor Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society, Conductor Kenneth Slowik first established his international reputation as a cellist and viola da gamba player. His work in these capacities with the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the Castle Trio, the Smithson String Quartet, the Axelrod Quartet, Party of Four, and with Anner Bylsma’s L’Archibudelli has been widely recognized and praised over many years. Now devoting increasing amounts of time to conducting the orchestral, oratorio and operatic repertoire with both modern instrument and period instrument ensembles, his work in this capacity has also elicited enthusiastic responses from audiences and critics alike. Slowik has been a featured instrumental soloist with the National Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. Frequently he provides the organ or harpsichord continuo for performances of large-scale baroque works at various festivals in the United States and abroad. His impressive discography comprises over fifty recordings. The most recent disc (Dorian DOR-90315) is both unusual and intriguing; it presents the chamber version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 as arranged by Erwin Stein in 1921 and the composer’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen as arranged by Arnold Schönberg in 1920. The recording has received outstanding reviews with a number of reviewers commenting that it deserves to be included along with the recordings of the orchestral version. Slowik’s extensive liner notes are alone worth the purchase price. Slowik has also recorded on the BMG/deutsche harmonia mundi, SONY Vivarte, Virgin Classics, Decca/L’Oiseau-Lyre, Harmonia Mundi France, EMI and Smithsonian Collection of Recordings labels. Of these, many have won prestigious international awards, featuring the artist as conductor, cellist, gambist and annotator in repertoire ranging from the baroque (Marais, Bach) through the classical (Haydn, Boccherini, Beethoven, Schubert) and Romantic (Mendelssohn, Gade, Spohr) to the early twentieth century (Schönberg, Barber, Richard Strauss). Slowik’s studies (at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik) were guided by Howard Mayer Brown, Karl Fruh, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, Robert Marshall, Frank Miller and Frederik Prausnitz. His involvement with 20th-century art music included many seasons with Ralph Shapey’s Contemporary Chamber Players and founding membership in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s resident ensemble “Twittering Machine.” For nearly a decade, Slowik was also active as a studio musician, working with figures from the world of popular music ranging from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughan to Quincey Jones, Curtis Mayfield and Roberta Flack. He made numerous recordings as a member of the Clemencic Consort and Joshua Rifkin’s Bach Ensemble, and has appeared as a guest artist with many prominent string quartets as well as with most of the leading U. S. early music ensembles. As an educator, Slowik has presented lectures at colleges and universities throughout the United States and has organized and contributed to a number of symposia and colloquia at the Smithsonian. His articles on music and performance practice have appeared in several scholarly journals; his annotations for recordings and concert programs are frequently cited as models in their field. He serves on the faculty of the University of Maryland and was named Artistic Director of the Baroque Performance Institute at the Oberlin College Conservatory in 1993. What People Are Saying About Kenneth Slowik . . . "Slowik has an artistic lucidity like daylight. He moved ahead with the players, rather than dragging them along. It was a case of everyone not only being on the same page, but in the same page. So firm was the partnership that Slowik often conducted with the barest of gestures, sometimes just standing and listening as the orchestra explored the way ahead. Then he would step into the picture, guiding here, exhorting there."
"Slowik's profound interaction with Bach's text and music is everywhere apparent in his direction."
"Only a performance as sensitive as Mr. Slowik's to all the minutely-shifting narrative connections that Schoenberg's program note sets forth can make the most of the composer's musical rhetoric."
"Under the direction of Kenneth Slowik, the Smithsonian players have mastered the elastic tempos and ebb and flow of early-20th-century style. The performance is utterly convincing in both mood and idiom."
"Conducting from the harpsichord, Kenneth Slowik led with surefooted attention to every nuance of Montiverdi's masterful setting."
"Slowik's flowing, intense, and heartfelt performance is its own reward."
"Slowik approaches the Strauss work [Metamorphosen] with equal parts integrity and affection, and the results are revelatory. This is a recording to put alongside Herbert von Karajan's: to these ears Slowik's interpretation is no less beautiful and is keener and more particular."
"Slowik paces this Bach Passion in such a thrilling and gripping manner that one can't help but think of the stage craft of a Hollywood film. It is breathtakingly, brutally, and unrelentingly dramatic."
"Slowik renders Strauss's dark, brooding masterpiece with impressive sympathy and clarity in a near-ideal performance."
"Slowik elicits a sound much clearer and cleaner than one expects from a modern orchestra, thus elucidating the musical structure. At the same time, however, the interpretation is anything but cerebral. The performance pours forth, spanning great arches despite its attention to detail, and drawing out in highly nuanced fashion all the music's expressive possibilities."
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