Nathan Cole is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first violin section. His debut recording Rapid Approach, an unaccompanied disc featuring the works of Bach and Bartók, along with world premier recordings of Augusta Read Thomas, was released in 2007 through Bacchanale Records. He has appeared in recent seasons as guest concertmaster with the symphonies of Houston, Oregon and Seattle, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa and Chicago’s Music of the Baroque. In addition to more than 100 concerts a year with the Symphony, Chicago audiences see Nathan through the CSO chamber series, the CSO contemporary series Music Now, Dame Myra Hess, and on WFMT’s “Live from Studio One”.
August 2009 will mark the third UBS Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, with Nathan as Music Director. The week-long festival includes three concerts at the Fasig-Tipton pavilion in the heart of the Bluegrass. This year’s festival welcomes Clancy Newman as composer-in-residence as well as guest cellist.
Prior to his CSO appointment in 2002, he served for two seasons as principal second violin of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, his solo debut came at the age of ten with the Louisville Orchestra. He received a Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Pamela Frank, Felix Galimir, Ida Kavafian and Jaime Laredo. Nathan’s love for chamber music flourished at Curtis, and in 1998 he became the founding first violinist of the Grancino String Quartet, which won the 2000 Barnett Competition in Chicago and participated in the 2000 Isaac Stern Chamber Music Encounters in Jerusalem. The Quartet made its New York debut in Carnegie’s Weill Hall in 2002. Nathan’s chamber music activities also include three summers at the Marlboro Music Festival, along with national tours as part of Music From Marlboro. For the last six summers, he has performed and taught at the Mimir Festival in Fort Worth, Texas.
Nathan joined the violin faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in 2006. His writing, on subjects from practice techniques to chamber music coaching, has appeared in Chamber Music, Strings and Symphony magazines.
Nathan lives in Lakeview with his wife Akiko Tarumoto, also a first violinist in the CSO, and their dog Fleur. “Nate’s violin” is by Vincenzo Postiglione, 1910. The pictures at the top of the page, however, are of a 1709 Stradivari violin, the “ex-Kempner”.
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