Graeme Steele Johnson & Alexey Zuev

• Graeme Steele Johnson (clarinet)

Praised for his “elegant and rounded sound” and “effortless, unmatched” technique, Graeme Steele Johnson is a versatile and imaginative clarinetist whose work bridges solo performance, chamber music, and innovative artistic projects. His career includes original initiatives such as a TEDx talk linking Mozart and Seinfeld, the reconstruction of a long-lost work by Charles Martin Loeffler, and performances of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Quintet on a custom elongated clarinet. He has appeared at major venues including the Library of Congress, Kennedy Center, Morgan Library, Ravinia, and numerous international festivals. As a concerto soloist, he has performed with orchestras such as the Vienna International Orchestra and the Vermont Mozart Festival Orchestra. Since 2022, Johnson has been the clarinetist of the internationally touring, award-winning quintet WindSync and collaborates widely with leading artists and ensembles. His arrangements of works by Mozart, Debussy, Gershwin, and Messiaen are performed worldwide. A prizewinner of several competitions, he holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, Yale School of Music, and doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. His Delos recording Forgotten Sounds includes the world-premiere recording of Loeffler’s Octet.

• Alexey Zuev (piano)

Born in St. Petersburg in 1982, Alexey Zuev gave his first public performance at the State Cappella of St. Petersburg at the age of eight, after beginning his piano studies at the city’s leading music schools. He has won numerous prestigious international awards, including First Prize at the St. Petersburg International Prokofiev Competition (1999), the Educational Award at the London International Piano Competition (2002), a prize at the Sviatoslav Richter Competition (2008), and Second Prize at the Géza Anda Piano Competition (2009). He graduated from the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in 2009, where he studied with Alexei Lubimov. Career highlights include debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as performances with the Netherlands Radio Symphony, the Orchestra of the 18th Century, and the Musikkollegium Winterthur. He gave the Russian premiere of John Adams’s Century Rolls with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Equally at ease on historical and modern pianos, Zuev combines an active performing career with teaching at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. In 2022, he released a five-CD boxed set on Fuga Libera dedicated to piano arrangements and transcriptions of works by Igor Stravinsky.