Kit Downes: Southern Bodies

With Bill Frisell and Musicians of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

Kit Downes is a BBC Jazz Award winning, Mercury Music Award-nominated solo recording artist for ECM Records. He has toured the world playing piano, church organ, and harmonium with his own bands (ENEMY, Troyka, and Elt) as well as with artists such as Squarepusher, Bill Frisell, Empirical, Andrew Cyrille, Sofia Jernberg, Benny Greb, Mica Levi, and Sam Amidon.

Downes performs solo pipe organ and solo piano concerts—and collaborates with with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton, composer Shiva Feshareki, saxophonist Ben van Gelder, and with the band ENEMY (with Petter Eldh and James Maddren).

He is also currently working with violinist Aidan O’Rourke, drummer Seb Rochford, composer Max de Wardener, and in the organ trio Deadeye with Reinier Baas and Jonas Burgwinkel.

He has written commissions for Cheltenham Music Festival, London Contemporary Orchestra, Biel Organ Festival, Ensemble Klang at ReWire Festival, the Scottish Ensemble, Cologne Philharmonie, and the Wellcome Trust. He also performed as part of the National Theatre production of Network from 2017-2018, featuring actor Bryan Cranston.

He has performed solo organ concerts at the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg, Lausanne Cathedral, Flagey in Brussels, the Royal Albert Hall and the Southbank Royal Festival Hall in London, Rochester Jazz Festival (U.S.), Saint Olaf Minneapolis (U.S.), Stavanger Konserthus, Aarhus Philharmonic Musikhuset, Darmstadt Organ Festival, Stuttgart Organ Festival, Laurenskerk in Rotterdam, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Berlin Jazz Festival, and the BBC Proms, amongst many others.

He holds a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied and now teaches. He has twice been awarded first place in Downbeat’s Critics Poll Rising Star for Organ and Keyboard categories respectively, and his ECM records Obsidian, Dreamlife of Debris, and Vermillion have been released to much critical acclaim.

Bill Frisell’s career as a guitarist and composer has spanned more than 40 years and many celebrated recordings. Frisell’s catalog has been cited by Downbeat as "the best recorded output of the decade."

In recent years, Frisell has forged a distinctive and fruitful collaborative partnership with the Blue Note label, releasing HARMONY, Valentine, and FOUR to great acclaim.

Recognized as one of America’s 21 most vital and productive performing artists, Frisell was named an inaugural Doris Duke Artist in 2012. He is also a recipient of grants from United States Artists, Meet the Composer among others. In 2016, he was a beneficiary of the first FreshGrass Composition commission to preserve and support innovative grassroots music. Frisell served as a Resident Artistic Director at San Francisco Jazz, upon its opening in 2013. Bill is the subject of a documentary film by director Emma Franz, entitled Bill Frisell: A Portrait, which examines his creative process in depth, and is the subject of an extensive biography by Philip Watson, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed The Sound of American Music.

"Frisell has had a lot of practice putting high concept into a humble package. Long hailed as one of the most distinctive and original improvising guitarists of our time, he has also earned a reputation for teasing out thematic connections with his music ... There’s a reason that Jazz at Lincoln Center had him program a series called Roots of Americana."—New York Times

Eunice Kim, violin

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area and described as "just superb" by The New York Times, violinist Eunice Kim has made solo appearances with Philadelphia Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Symphony, and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, amongst many others. Kim made her solo debut at the age of seven with the Korean Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra in Seoul. An avid chamber musician, Kim has attended festivals such as Marlboro Music School and Festival and Ravinia's Steans Institute, and she is currently the violinist of the Steans Piano Trio. She regularly tours the country with bassist Xavier Foley with programs that explore many genres outside of the traditional works. Kim graduated with a bachelor’s degree at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she led the Curtis Symphony Orchestra as concertmaster and was awarded with the prestigious Milka Violin Artist Prize upon graduation.

Daniel Orsen, viola

Violist Daniel Orsen is a member of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO). Prior to joining the SPCO, Orsen lived for six years in Boston, where he performed with A Far Cry, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Fermata Chamber Soloists, and the Phoenix Chamber Orchestra, and founded and directed Jamaica Plain Chamber Music from 2019-2022. 

As soloist, Orsen has performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Stamitz Viola Concerto with the Fermata Chamber Soloists, Vaughan Williams’s Christmas Suite with the Pittsburgh Civic Orchestra, and Thea Musgrave’s Lamenting Ariadne with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble. His chamber festival credits include Oak Hill, Krzyzowa, Ravinia, Verbier, Prussia Cove, Taos, and the Perlman Music Program. 

Orsen is one half of the long-distance viola-piano duo, Wagner’s Nightmare, which occasionally roasts Richard Wagner. The duo’s eponymous album, Wagner’s Nightmare, released this past April. Every piece on the album is connected in some way to something or someone whom Wagner did not like, and features the rarely heard Viola Alta, a massive 19-inch viola Wagner specified for use in his orchestra at Bayreuth. 

Orsen has an interest in cultural and intellectual history which has manifested itself not only in Wagner’s Nightmare, but in essays published by The Anglican Way, CREATED, and The Journal of the American Viola Society, and a blog on Substack reviewing CDs.  

In addition to his private studio, Orsen teaches viola and chamber music at the Saint Paul Conservatory of Music.  

Orsen is a native of Pittsburgh, PA. He was taught and mentored by members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Credo, and the Perlman Music Program before his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory with Peter Slowik and the New England Conservatory with Kim Kashkashian. He plays on a 2013 Philip Injeian viola and a 2014 Benoit Rolland bow, both specially made for him.

Richard Belcher, cello

New Zealand cellist Richard Belcher joined The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) in 2019. As the founding cellist of the Grammy-nominated Ensō String Quartet, he performed for almost two decades in many of the great concert halls throughout the world, and made several highly acclaimed recordings. Since 2008, Belcher has been principal cello of ROCO in Houston, TX. He has performed as soloist in concertos with both ROCO and the SPCO. He also played as a member of the Minnesota Orchestra for its 2022-23 Season.

Since 2018, Belcher has been the artistic director of Music on the Hill, a chamber music series in Mankato, MN. He continues to be a frequent guest at festivals throughout the USA. 

Belcher moved to the United States in 1998 to study at Yale University where he co-founded the Ensō Quartet. He plays a cello made by N.F Vuillaume in 1856.