Featured Artists
Derek Bermel
Guest Composer
Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been featured at major concert halls and festivals worldwide. Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “To listen to his music is to run across a wealth of influences, from Bartók and Stravinsky to big band, and from early-period rap to Bulgarian folk music to West African drumming. Also, it seems, theoretical physics.” He studied Thracian folk style with Nikola Iliev in Bulgaria, uillean pipes with Mick O’Brien in Dublin, Lobi xylophone with Ngmen Baaru in Ghana, caxixi in Brazil with Júlio Góes, and ethnomusicology and orchestration with André Hajdu in Jerusalem. Bermel’s composition teachers include Louis Andriessen, Bill Albright, William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, André Hajdu, and Michael Tenzer.
He has scored several films and collaborated with a dizzying array of artists including writers Sandra Cisneros, Will Eno, Nicole Krauss, and Wendy S. Walters, visual artists Sook-Jin Jo, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Shimon Attie, composer/performers Wynton Marsalis, Midori, Paquito D’Rivera, Christopher Taylor, and Luciana Souza, choreographer S. Ama Wray, and hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey (Mos Def).
Bermel is thrice GRAMMY-nominated, twice for Best Contemporary Composition—for Migration Series for jazz band and orchestra, dedicated to Wynton Marsalis, and for Intonations for the JACK Quartet—and once as Best Soloist with Orchestra for Voices, a clarinet concerto he has performed on four continents. His discography includes Migrations with the Albany Symphony and Juilliard Jazz Orchestra (Naxos); Intonations with the JACK Quartet (Naxos); Voices with Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP/Sound); Soul Garden, small ensemble/solo music (New World/CRI); and Canzonas Americanas with Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe).
He has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator of concert series, including three SONiC Festivals as artistic director with the American Composers Orchestra, the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the Cone Series at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (where he served four years as Artist-in-Residence).
Over the years he has received commissions from the Pittsburgh, National, Seattle, Saint Louis, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, WNYC Radio, La Jolla Music Society, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, eighth blackbird, Guarneri String Quartet, Music From Copland House, and the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations. Honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award. Recent residencies include Nuova Consonanza Festival in Rome, IC Festival in Hong-Kong, Kempten Classix in Germany, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and Hyllos, a collaboration with Veenfabriek and Asko|Schönberg Ensemble in the Netherlands. In 2025 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Andreia Pinto Correia
Guest Composer
Andreia Pinto Correia’s music—described as "fascinating" by the San Francisco Classical Voice and “compellingly meditative” by the Boston Globe—is characterized by close attention to harmonic detail and timbral color. Following a family tradition of scholars and writers, her work often reflects the influence of literary sources from the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.
Honors include the inaugural Sorel Award, the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Shostakovich-DSCH Award for her "contribution to the excellence of Portuguese classical music" from the Ministry of Culture of Portugal. She has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic (with maestro Gustavo Dudamel), European Union Presidency, Tanglewood Music Center/ Boston Symphony Orchestra, Washington Performing Arts (Kennedy Center), São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, League of American Orchestras and the Toulmin Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, National Symphony and National Dance Company of Portugal, and Culturgest/National Bank of Portugal, among others.
Pinto Correia was the curator of the Fertile Crescent Festival for Contemporary Music at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and composer in residence with contemporary music ensemble OrchestrUtópica (Lisbon). She received the honorary title of Fellow of the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, where she was a guest of the ARC Laureate Program for the Deep Human Past and the Indigenous Linguistics Alliance (Fall 2018). She has collaborated with an array of artists and scholars including historian Professor Ann McGrath (Australia), marine biologist Dr. Claudio Campagna (Argentina), filmmakers Daniel Blaufuks and Salomé Lamas (Portugal), writers Mia Couto (Mozambique), Ondjaki (Angola), Betty Shamieh (Palestine/USA), her father–medievalist and poet Professor João David Pinto Correia–and choreographers Omayra Amaya (Spain/USA), Jodi Melnick (USA), and Victor Pontes (Portugal).
Born in Portugal, Pinto Correia began her musical studies in her native Lisbon at the Academia de Amadores de Música, the Escola de Jazz Luíz Villas-Boas, and the University of Lisbon. She received a double degree from the Berklee College of Music and Masters and Doctoral of Music degrees in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music. Recently she was Visiting Associate Professor of Composition at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, and is currently faculty and co-curator of the Gamper Music New Music Series at the Bowdoin International Festival. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Quintet Attacca
Guest Ensemble
Founded in 1999, Quintet Attacca is one of Chicago's most dynamic chamber music ensembles. Grand Prize Winner and Wind Division Gold Medal Winner of the 2002 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the quintet spent 2006-2009 as the Chicago Chamber Musicians' Professional Development Program Ensemble. Quintet Attacca is also proud to be in residence at the Music Institute of Chicago, offering performances, family programming, chamber music coaching, and individual lessons.
Quintet Attacca is an ensemble dedicated to bringing the unique sound of the wind quintet to all types of audiences: to this end, the quintet has played in venues across the Midwest, with extensive programming in Chicago. Quintet Attacca has reached audiences from Italy (at the 2003 Emilia Romagne Festival) to New York (at the Schneider Concerts Series at the New School) to concert halls all over Chicagoland as well as many live broadcasts on WFMT. Recent performances have included the First Monday Series at the Chicago Cultural Center and a residency with Chamber Music Society of Detroit.
Priding itself on its innovative programming, Quintet Attacca enjoys presenting concerts that are both accessible and cutting-edge. Programs have included works that reflect the Classical and Romantic eras, as well as jazz and Latin influenced works and pieces by many of today’s leading composers. Additionally, five works have been written for the quintet: Vid Smooke's Trompe L'oeil, Collin Anderson's Tangram, Rami Levin’s Dancas Brasilieras and Portrait, and Dana McCormick's Two Episodes for Wind Quintet. To create balanced and entertaining programs, Quintet Attacca combines the challenges of today's most intriguing works with gems from the past.
Trio Diorama
Guest Ensemble
Trio Diorama is comprised of violinist MingHuan Xu and pianist Winston Choi, both performers on the world stage and professors at Roosevelt University, joining four-time Grammy winning cellist and CM@B Executive and Artistic Director Nick Photinos.
Violinist MingHuan Xu performs extensively as a soloist, duo-recitalist, and chamber musician throughout five continents. Her Carnegie Hall debut was featured on Voice of America, a weekly television show viewed by millions of people in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She is a core member of Ensemble Dal Niente, Artistic Director of the Unity Chamber Series at the Unity Temple in Oak Park, as well as Artistic Director of the Chicago International Music Institute. Ms. Xu is on the faculty at Loyola University Chicago and Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.
Four-time GRAMMY Award-winning cellist Nick Photinos is one of the most innovative cellists of our time, collaborating with artists including Björk, Wilco, Bryce Dessner, Dawn Upshaw, Philip Glass, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars in tours throughout the world. Currently faculty at the Longy School of Music, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University, Photinos served for 24 years as the founding cellist and co-Artistic Director of Eighth Blackbird. For more information: nickphotinos.com.
Pianist Winston Choi’s solo, collaborative, chamber, and concerto appearances have taken him across four continents, with recent recital appearances at the National Arts Centre of Canada, Carnegie-Weill Recital Hall, Kennedy Center, Kravis Center, Library of Congress, Merkin Recital Hall, and throughout France. His debut CD, the complete piano works of Elliott Carter, received five stars from BBC Music Magazine. Choi is an Associate Professor and the Head of the Piano Program at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.