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ROBERT HICKSScott Kluksdahl has found a balance between teaching at USF and performing as he furthers the work of new composers.
Scott Kluksdahl loves the cello's range, its warmth and subtlety, its ability to paint a vivid picture, its potential to speak in a human voice.
"It's so warm and enormous and resonant," he says. "It actually feels good to make a sound on the cello."
Kluksdahl, 40, a renowned cellist and faculty member at the University of South Florida, is a strong advocate of contemporary composers such as Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Wernick and Bernard Rands, the late Robert Helps, Augusta Read Thomas, David del Tredici and Elliott Carter. He will perform with longtime colleague New York pianist Noreen Cassidy-Polera at the Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday.
The program will include Helps' Duo for Cello and Piano (1977), Gabriel Faure's Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano (opus 117) and Wernick's Duo and Cello for Piano (2001), which is dedicated to Helps' memory.
"I think the piano-cello repertoire is just absolutely, superbly crafted music," Kluksdahl says. "It's something that classic, Romantic and modern composers have been drawn to, this duo combination, because the cello's range is so vast. How composers handle voicing around the cello with its multilayered range has been done in so many ways. I find it endlessly fascinating."
Violinists Valerie Adams, a member of the Florida Orchestra, and Carol Rodman, who teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music, will join the duo to perform Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major.
"I thought the program needed a little lightening up," Kluksdahl says. "The rest of the program is a tall order for listener and player. It's rigorous but fascinating."
Growing up in Marin County, Calif., Kluksdahl studied piano and double bass before switching to cello after hearing Jean Mitchell perform Strauss' Don Quixote with the Marin Symphony.
"I knew right then that I wanted to make that sound," he says.
Another pivotal experience was seeing cellist Margaret Rowell, then a prominent music professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, perform on a PBS documentary. The teenage Kluksdahl asked if he could study cello with her. She reluctantly gave him an audition and was won over by his talent.
"She fueled my love for music," Kluksdahl says. "She gave me a marvelous, kinesthetic understanding of the cello. She taught by encouragement, so that anything seemed possible. She was a marvelous example of a human being."
As a high school student, he debuted with the San Francisco Symphony, and he earned a B.A. in English and American literature at Harvard. He took a chamber music course from composer Leon Kirchner, learned conducting under the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra and sang in the Harvard University Choir. As a graduate student at the Juilliard School, he studied with cellist Joel Krosnick, who introduced him to composers Wernick, Donald Martino and Ralph Shapey. After teaching briefly at Juilliard and fulfilling a stint as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, he joined the USF faculty in 1991.
"I've always wanted to combine performing and teaching. For me, it works very well," Kluksdahl says. "I knew of USF's reputation historically as focusing on new music."
Helps was friend, colleague and mentor to Kluksdahl, whose Lions Gate Trio recorded Helps' Trio No. 2 in 1999 on Centaur Records. After Helps died in the fall of 2001, Kluksdahl received a gift from his estate that helped pay for his commission of Wernick's Duo for Piano and Cello. Kluksdahl has also recorded Wernick's Cadenzas and Variations III for Composers Recordings Inc. in New York.
"As cellists and players, I feel we are obligated to be fully involved in creating the ongoing history of the instrument and the repertory," he says. "I think it's important to reach out and work with living composers."
Kluksdahl's plans include commissioning duo works from Thomas, Rands and del Tredici. Lions Gate Trio plans to record Schumann's trio works for Centaur Records. Kluksdahl also hopes to perform six series of works for solo cello, including pieces by composers Domenico Gabrielli and Benjamin Britten, with the Bach Suites as the centerpiece. And there's more.
"I want to do a song cycle for cello and voice," he says. "The cello in its own way can paint pictures and illustrate words so well."
PREVIEW: Cellist Scott Kluksdahl is featured in a recital at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg. Reception afterward. $15, $7 students ages 22 and younger. (727) 896-2667.