Colin Carr

• Cellist
• Teacher

Biography

Colin Carr: Conductors with whom he has worked include Rattle, Gergiev, Dutoit, Elder, Skrowasczewski and Marriner. He is a regular guest at the BBC Proms, has twice toured Australia and has recently played concertos in South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia and New Zealand. Mr. Carr's most memorable performances include the Dvorak Concerto to close the Prague Autumn Festival, and Beethoven's Triple Concerto, with Sir Colin Davis conducting, at Royal Festival Hall in London.

The 2007-08 season includes cycles of Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano with his duo partner Thomas Sauer in New York, Salt Lake City, Princeton and Oxford, England. As a member of the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio, he recorded and toured extensively for 20 years. He is a frequent visitor to international chamber music festivals worldwide and has appeared often as a guest with the Guarneri and Emerson string quartets and with New York's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Mr. Carr's 2006-07 season highlights included four performances of Don Quixote in Germany, Shostakovich Concerto No. 1 in Korea, the original version of the Rococo Variations in Holland and Shostakovich Concerto No. 2 in the USA. He recently gave several cycles of the Bach Suites in London, and in the United States at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York and at the Gardner Museum in Boston.

Recitals take Mr. Carr to major cities each season, with regular performances in London, New York and Boston. Carr's GM recordings of the unaccompanied cello works of Kodaly, Britten, Crumb, and Schuller, as well as his Bach Suites, are highly acclaimed. The Brahms Sonatas on Arabesque, with pianist Lee Luvisi, is also a favorite. Mr. Carr was the soloist in Elgar's Cello Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic for a BBC Music Magazine recording. Colin Carr is the winner of many prestigious international awards, including First Prize in the Naumburg Competition, the Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Award and Second Prize in the Rostropovich International Cello Competition. Mr. Carr first played the cello at the age of five. Three years later he went to the Yehudi Menuhin School, where he studied with Maurice Gendron and later William Pleeth. He was made a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in 1998, having been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston for 16 years.

In 1998, St. John's College, Oxford created the post of "Musician in Residence" for him, and in September 2002 he became a professor at Stony Brook University in New York.