Praised by the New York Times as “an artist who makes one hang on every note,” Robert deMaine, the principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, celebrated soloist and chamber musician, will be welcomed by the cello studio at UCLA for the first time. He will be sharing his wisdom with our string students about music-making, performance practice, and his diverse career experiences. Graduate cello students will participate, performing in works by Rachmaninoff, Carter, Haydn, and Mansurian.
Robert deMaine is a highly sought-after solo artist and chamber musician; he is a frequent guest artist at many of the world's premier chamber music festivals, including those of Marlboro, Seattle, Great Lakes, Limoges, Heidelberg Schlossfest, Chamberfest Cleveland, Montréal, Seoul’s Ditto Festival, and most recently featured as a soloist at the 2016 Piatigorsky Cello Festival. His playing is noted for its "beautiful singing tone, lapidary technical precision, and a persuasive identification with the idiom of the music at hand." As a soloist, he performs the great works of the repertoire both old and new from concertos by Haydn, Dvorak, Elgar, and Penderecki, as well as more recent works by John Williams and Christopher Theofanidis. As a recitalist, the great works for cello and piano as well as the suites of J.S. Bach remain staples of his repertoire, and as one critic noted, his playing was "magnificent" and that his "technical brilliance is surpassed only by the beauty of tones he produces."