To share music with the community throughout the year, the Brevard Music Center presents free concerts to the public on the first Mondays of each month, October through May (except January).

February's event:

• Steve Cohen, clarinet ~ Katherine Palmer, piano
• Monday, February 6, 2012 at 12:30 p.m.
• Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd

The Music Center's host for these concerts is the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Brevard, NC. The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd is located at 22 Fisher Road on the corner of North Broad Street and Fisher Road across from Ingles. Parking for this event is in the church parking lot located on the premises.

Francis Poulenc: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano

Robert Muczyinski: Time Pieces, Op. 43

Benjamin Britten: Metamorphoses after Ovid, op. 49 (trans. Cohen)

Bela Kovacs: Sholem Alekhem Rov Feidman

Ennio Morricone: Suite from Cinema Paradiso

Steve Cohen is professor of clarinet at Northwestern University. He is the former principal clarinetist with the New Orleans Symphony, later known as the Louisiana Philharmonic. Cohen joined the New Orleans Symphony in 1975 and remained as principal clarinet with its successor, the Louisiana Philharmonic through May of 2004. He was featured as concerto soloist with that orchestra many times and has also been featured as concerto soloist at the Brevard Music Center, where he has played and continues to play principal clarinet each summer since 1979.

Cohen has toured in the U.S. as principal clarinet with the Texas Opera Theater and throughout Europe as principal clarinet with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. He maintains an active yearly solo, chamber music and master class schedule and has performed solo recitals and master classes throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Korea. He was guest artist and master class clinician with the Seoul Philharmonic Clarinet Festival, the Oklahoma Clarinet Symposium on many occasions, has performed at ICA clarinet conventions and the Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine.

Since moving to Chicago in 2005 he has performed regularly with the Chicago Symphony, the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Music of the Baroque Orchestra and performs in chamber music groups throughout the Chicago area. In the winter of 2007, he returned to Korea and conducted a week of master classes in Seoul and in the summer of 2007, performed recitals and conduct master classes at the China International Clarinet Festival in Beijing, China. In the summers of 2006 -2008 he was also on the faculty of the Aria International Summer Institute. He has participated as guest faculty at the Indiana University clarinet workshops, taught as guest faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Southern California.

Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Cohen studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a clarinet and piano major. His clarinet teachers at Oberlin included Loren Kitt and Larry McDonald. He studied for a year with Karl Leister in Berlin, Germany and subsequently with Robert Marcellus in Cleveland and Chicago. Mr. Cohen is a former faculty member at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Louisiana State University. He is an artist/clinician for Buffet clarinets and a Legere reed artist. He was a host of the ICA 2001 convention in New Orleans and has written many articles for the Clarinet magazine.

An Artist/Faculty member at the Brevard Music Center from 1993-2000, Katherine Morgan Palmer has performance degrees from the University of Tennessee and from Indiana University, where she was a student of Menahem Pressler. She is an active chamber musician and has performed with such noted artists as Joseph Robinson, former principal oboe of the New York Philharmonic and his violinist wife, Mary Kay Robinson, formerly of the Atlanta and New Jersey Symphonies; Charles Vernon, bass trombonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and tenor saxophonist James Houlik. She performs frequently with trumpeter Larry Black, former member of the Atlanta Symphony. Having a particular interest in new music, she has collaborated with many contemporary composers, including Timothy Crist, Juilliard professors Samuel Adler and Eric Ewazen, as well as with her husband, Robert Glenn Palmer. Currently, she is on the music faculty at Brevard College and is the pianist with the Mountain Chamber Players, the Brevard College Ensemble-in-Residence.