The Middlebury Performing Arts Series kicks off a suite of concerts with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) with a free, virtual performance by clarinetist David Shifrin on Friday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 p.m. Shifrin will perform works by Mozart, Bassi and Duke Ellington. (Audiences may be interested to learn that Duke Ellington performed on Middlebury’s Performing Arts Series back in 1960.) This dynamic program also features violinists Danbi Um and Bella Hristova, violist Mark Holloway, cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Gloria Chien.
This concert is presented as part of CMS: Front Row, a series of exceptionally high-quality, digital chamber music concerts curated by David Finckel and Wu Han, who are frequent performers on the Middlebury Performing Arts Series themselves. They will introduce the virtual concert and lead a post-show Q&A. The broadcast will also include a live chat and behind-the-scenes material. Middlebury’s CMS: Front Row broadcasts are part of the Nelson Fund series, and are made possible with generous support from Raphael and Jane Bernstein.
The Oct. 9 concert will also feature a 7:15 p.m. “opening act” by oboist Dan Frostman, who is also Library Manager at Middlebury, and an Affiliate Artist with the Department of Music.

About the Artist
A Yale University faculty member since 1987, clarinetist Shifrin is artistic director of Yale’s Chamber Music Society and Yale in New York, an annual concert series at Carnegie Hall. He has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1982 and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004, inaugurating CMS’s Bowers Program and the annual Brandenburg Concerto concerts. He has been the artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon since 1981. He has collaborated with the Guarneri, Tokyo and Emerson quartets, and frequently performs with pianist André Watts. Winner of the Avery Fisher Prize (one of only two wind players to have been awarded the prestigious prize since the award’s inception in 1974), he is also the recipient of a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a top prize winner in the Munich and Geneva competitions.
He has held principal clarinet positions in numerous orchestras including The Cleveland Orchestra and the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski. His recordings have received three Grammy nominations, and his performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra was named Record of the Year by Stereo Review. His most recent recordings are the Beethoven, Bruch and Brahms Clarinet Trios with cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han on the ArtistLed label, and a recording for Delos of works by Carl Nielsen. Shifrin performs on a MoBA cocobolo wood clarinet made by Morrie Backun in Vancouver, Canada and uses Légère Reeds.
See Shifrin perform live on Friday evening through a digital broadcast and live chat accessible via middlebury.edu/arts. The performance is free and open to all. For more information call 802-443-MIDD (6433).