Bio and Reviews

Short Bio

Karen Bentley Pollick is a native of Palo Alto, California where she was concertmaster and conductor of the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra and studied with Camilla Wicks in San Francisco. She then attended Indiana University where she studied violin with Josef Gingold, coached string quartets with Rostislav Dubinsky and graduated with a Masters of Music Degree in Violin Performance in 1987. Other violin teachers include Nathan Milstein, Yuval Yaron, Glenn and Harold Dicterow, and David Balakrishnan.

She has several recordings of original music, including Electric Diamond, Angel, Konzerto and Succubus, Ariel View and Dancing Suite to Suite. She has received three music awards from Just Plain Folks, including Best Instrumental Album and Best Song for Ariel View. Ms. Pollick's latest recording amberwood was recorded in March 2007 in Birmingham, Alabama and is comprised of duo compositions for violin/viola and piano by Ivan Sokolov, Jan Vičar and Ole Saxe.

Ms. Pollick was concertmaster of the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1984 and has participated in the June in Buffalo and Wellesley Composers Conferences as a champion of contemporary music. Alongside pianist/composer Ivan Sokolov, she performed compositions by Charles Norman Mason, Dorothy Hindman and Sokolov at the American Academy of Rome in May 2006. With cellist Dennis Parker she concertized throughout the Czech Republic during the 2007 and 2008 American Spring Festivals. She is a founding member of the Alys Stephens Center Chamber Players as well as the violinist in Paul Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band and has collaborated with the Seattle Chamber Players in their Icebreaker II: Baltic Voices Festival, and the New York based Ensemble for the Romantic Century in their staged production of The Young Arthur Rubinstein. She has performed at the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival and the Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival.

Ms. Pollick performs on a violin made by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume in 1860 and a 1987 viola by William Whedbee.

Long Bio

Karen Bentley Pollick pursues a unique career as a violinist, violist, conductor and pianist. She attended Indiana University where her principal violin teachers were Josef Gingold and Yuval Yaron. Ms. Pollick graduated with a Masters of Music degree in Violin Performance in 1987. Other teachers include Camilla Wicks, Nathan Milstein, Glenn Dicterow and Jean Jacques Kantorow.

She has concertized as soloist throughout the capitals of Europe, Asia, the United States, Canada, and Russia where she performed Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the Beethoven Violin Concerto. She has several recordings of original music including Electric Diamond, Angel, Konzerto and Succubus, Ariel View, and Dancing Suite to Suite, which was awarded second place in the Just Plain Folks 2004 Record Awards Best Classical Soloist Album category. She collaborates with percussionist Ian Dogole of Global Fusion Music in a variety of musical styles merging violin, viola and Norwegian hardangerfele with percussion instruments from around the globe. A champion of contemporary music, she has premiered compositions by David Felder, John Halle, Cindy Cox, Stuart Diamond and Bruce Hanifan among others for violin and piano, solo violin, and violin with electronics. Ms. Pollick has toured with the New York Philharmonic, Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, the Bolshoi Ballet, Barbra Streisand, and performed in the New Mexico and Seattle Symphonies and recorded with the Dave Matthews Band and Evanescence, as well as numerous film scores at Skywalker Ranch.

She has been concertmaster of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie Kammerorchester as well as the New York String Orchestra under Alexander Schneider. During the summers she has participated in the June in Buffalo Composers Seminar, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Olympic Music Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, and the Next Generation Festival in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the San Francisco Bay Area she was Associate Concertmaster of the Monterey County Symphony and conducted the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra Preparatory Orchestra. She was music director of the PACO Bach Celebration series and has conducted the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra on numerous occasions. Ms. Pollick received a grant from the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley for the world premiere of Swedish composer Ole Saxe's Dance Suite for Solo Violin in December, 2000 and premiered Mr. Saxe's Dance Suite for Solo Violin and Orchestra with Redwood Symphony, with whom she has also performed John Corigliano's Chaconne from The Red Violin as well as violin concertos of Bela Bartok and Sergei Prokofiev.

She is currently the violinist in Paul Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band, which performed at Carnegie's Zankel Hall as part of the In Your Ear festival, hosted by John Adams. She has also collaborated with the Moscow based contemporary music group Opus Posthumous under the direction of Tatiana Grindenko and with the Seattle Chamber Players in their Icebreaker II: Baltic Voices Festival, which was featured on St. Paul Sunday on April 10, 2005. She has performed with the Four Horizons Quartet in the Philadelphia area, featuring a quartet by Penn composer Jay Reise as well as compositions by Lebanon Valley College composer Scott Eggert. Ms. Pollick currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama where she is First Lady of Birmingham Southern College. Highlights of the 2005-2006 season included her debut with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, recitals with pianist Yakov Kasman, and world premieres at the American Academy in Rome by pianist composer Ivan Sokolov and BSC composition professors Dorothy Hindman and Charles Norman Mason (winner of the 2005 Samuel Barber Rome Prize). She is a founding member of the Alys Stephens Center Chamber Players which debuted in Birmingham in August, 2006 at the Magic City Chamber Music Festival. Other highlights of the 2006-2007 season include a performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Redwood Symphony, recitals with Ivan Sokolov in Seattle and Birmingham, and touring with Paul Dresher's highly acclaimed new one man opera The Tyrant featuring tenor John Duykers.

Reviews

"Musically, the most riveting moment of the evening came in the Largo of a Leclair Sonata in A for Flute and Violin, with its sinuously, sensuously intertwining lines. Karen Bentley was the fine violinist." -- The New York Times

"Bentley was more than a match for the music's volatility, continually transforming her tone with sudden shifts of mood and temper." -- East Bay Express

"Bentley played with a rare degree of maturity and artistic discernment." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

" 'Another Face' featured violinist Karen Bentley in the bravura soloist role, a technically imposing part that she executed with dazzling ferocity." -- The Buffalo News

"Karen Bentley's violin represented the mind in creative tumult, a
beautiful lyric performance in which her fellow instrumentalists joined in
with comments, agreement and disagreement." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Bentley capitalizes on the expressive possibilities of her assignment." -- San Francisco Examiner

"Pleasure was also the key to Karen Bentley's performance of the solo part in the Violin Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major, K. 207. Bentley keeps growing as a performer with each of her local appearances. Technically her performance was flawless, and her warm tones in the Andante and her lightheartedness in the fast movements were well chosen for this particular piece." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

"Bentley played the work with remarkable authority. It was not only her technique and tone but a kind of electricity that made it exciting." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

"Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4 in D, K.218, was gratifying, with Karen
Bentley clearly in her element as a soloist" -- Anchorage Daily News

"...a brilliant performance by Karen Bentley. Bentley, 17, the orchestra's concertmistress, played the Mozart concerto with clean technique, exact intonation and bright rhythms. There were innumerable little cadenzas in decorative passages, but the large cadenza, charmingly developed, was her own." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

"...the absolute precision, intonation, beauty and depth of feeling of Karen Bentley's rendition of Mozart's Violin Concerto #5 in A Major was flawless. I don't believe Mozart would have wished it otherwise." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

"Karen Bentley gave us a fine performance of Schoenberg's "Phantasy". Bentley brought power and grace to the performance, as well as virtuosity. Both her and Sprecher were attentive to Schoenberg's sense of phrase and the result was a wonderful performance of a work too infrequently heard." -- Bloomington Herald-Telephone

"The hardest thing to do is describe what defies description. You can feel that a concert is special because it has that magic spark which makes the music come alive and strike a responsive chord in the listener. But what is that magic? Is it the technical perfection of the performers? Their insight? Their responsiveness to each other? Is it their own intensity of feeling which they communicate to you? Whatever it is, Bentley and Wodehouse had it in their spell-binding performance on Friday. It made the Debussy a study in sensuality and the Gershwin preludes a revel of robust vitality. Under their fingers the music took over so completely that the listener lost awareness of the performers." -- Peninsula Times Tribune

"Conventionally, this piece (Bartók Violin Concerto No. 2) is often treated quite narrowly as a 20th Century, often dissonant work. It took violinist Karen Bentley, a local product, Maestro Eric Kujawsky and the orchestra to dig deeper into that complex mass of notes and phrases to expose to the ears the hitherto overlooked Romantic content that expands it into a moving emotional experience. Bentley, a straightforward and utterly unaffected performer, has an outstanding interpretive musicianship that had the audience demanding her back again and again for curtain calls." -- Redwood City Tribune

"Charm is not the word that springs immediately to mind when contemplating the powerful visions of David Felder's Crossfire. Karen Bentley's elegant and powerful violin, and trombonist Barrie Webb's awesome stunning power coupled with the stark video images made a powerful impact...'What a Show!'" -- Yorkshire Post

"Bentley, as first violinist and soloist, led the small chamber orchestra, most of the musicians standing as they played. This included five additional violinists, harpsichordist Jonathan Salzedo, an early music specialist with wide experience nationwide, and several others. All provided solid, spirited support for the frolic. The sense of rustic bliss was enhanced by the lighted redwoods visible outside the church through an enormous window just behind the low altar.
The Concerto for Oboe and Violin featured Roger Wiesmeyer and Karen Bentley, the latter a Palo Alto musician whose career has ranged from playing in and with renowned orchestras and ensembles around the world to progressive rock. Bentley's tone was bright, her style ranging widely from lyrical to almost fiery in the final Allegro. Wiesmeyer's oboe sang out in the Adagio over neat pizzicato strings and sprinted through the closing movement." -- San Francisco Classical Voice

"Andrew Imbrie's Impromptu for violin and piano (1960) is a continuous work in several connected movements. It also treated the instruments with great independence. Atonal in language, rhythmically free and varied, sensitive to color and texture in shaping its materials, this piece still showed the classical roots underpinning its form and its use of motives. Karen Bentley and Gwendolyn Mok were in control of the work's considerable challenges, and communicated its freshness, lyricism, and vitality." -- San Francisco Classical Voice

"Perhaps I was most taken by Karen Bentley and her violin. Her adaptation to the changes in the improv selections, her mastery over arpeggiated scales and her sheer control over her instrument all came together and made for the epitome of a disciplined classical musician. All in all, Electric Diamond put on a killer demonstration." -- John Foxworthy

Another instrumentalist new to me as I believe that this is her first issued disc. Scandinavian composer Ole Saxe has written a superb suite of dances for solo violin and viola. Although the viola has just a short section of the Dance Suite, I so thoroughly enjoyed the disc and the talents of Ms. Bentley that I just had to review the record for the Journal. Her tone, phrasing, and technique provide all the background she needs to impress any music lover. I have been in touch with Ms. Bentley and she promises a disc devoted to the viola in the not too distant future. Brava! -- David O. Brown

Bentley, swaying energetically as she played, amplified the tango spirit ...
read more from Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Chorale Times Two, the second movement of Dresher's 1996-97 violin concerto, pitted a rhapsodic violin soliloquy, superbly played by Karen Bentley Pollick, against Dresher's more piercing electric guitar riffs. Again, the music depended on the contrasts -- in both time and texture -- between these two veins. -- Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle Music Critic

Yet the strongest impression was made by Onute Narbutaite, a 47-year-old Lithuanian whose work had apparently never been performed in America. Her most characteristic mode is slow, ruminative, gorgeously lyrical and utterly haunting. "WinterSerenade" (1997) -- exquisitely played by Mr. Shmidt, the flutist Paul Taub and the violist Karen Bentley Pollick -- is constructed of motifs from "Gute Nacht," the first song in Schubert's cycle Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), set for the ensemble of Beethoven's early Serenade in D (Op. 25). But it is not a pastiche. Its wispy texture and absorbingly sustained mood keep it going three times as long as the original and make you forget it -- until the ending, which releases your attention with a whispered quotation from Schubert's piano introduction. For the rest, Schubert is magically transformed into nature sounds, sighs, sobs and faltering steps. -- Richard Taruskin, New York Times