Prof. Eric Edberg Reunites with His 1790 Cello at Wednesday Concert

July 28, 2008

July 28, 2008, Greencastle, Ind. - DePauw University School of Music Professor Eric Edberg celebrates the return of his 1790 Italian cello, which just finished 3 years of restoration, with a Wednesday concert as part of the Greencastle Classical Music Festival. The 7:30 p.m. performance will take place at Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church on the DePauw campus. Admission is free, with donations accepted.

Edberg will be joined by concert pianist Nariaki Sugiura in a program of music by Arvo Pärt, Franz Schubert, and Frédéric Chopin. Sugiura tours internationally as a recitalist and a chamber musician and gives lessons and master classes throughout the U.S. as well as tours in Europe and Asia. He has recently appeared on the concert stages at the Roundtop Music Festival in Texas, the Fox River Chamber Music Festival in Wisconsin, and in South Korea and Japan. Since 2002, he has been collaborating with a cellist Emilio Colón, and they have toured in the U.S., South Korea, Japan and Puerto Rico.

"I'm very excited about this concert," says Edberg, who serves as artistic director of the Festival. "First, it is a thrill to perform with Nariaki, who is an extraordinary young pianist who knows the cello-piano literature as well as any pianist I've known. He's an absolute joy to make music with. And the restoration of my 1790 Pietro Pallotta cello was just completed, and this is my first concert reunited with my cello."

In the spring of 2005, Edberg's cello developed a large crack that ran nearly the entire length of the top. It has been painstakingly restored by Russell Wagner of Chicago Celloworks.

"Russell is widely regarded as the top cello restorer in the country," explains Edberg. "In addition to the new crack which developed in 2005, the cello had a number of old cracks that had been somewhat crudely repaired in the past. Russell took the cello completely apart, removed the old glue from all the cracks, and redid the repairs in a way which makes it nearly impossible to tell there ever were any cracks. What he's done is absolutely amazing. And the cello sounds better than ever!"

Eric Edberg attended the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Juilliard School, SUNY Stony Brook, and Florida State University, and studied with Gary Hoffman, Denis Brott, Stephen Kates, Leonard Rose and Bernard Greenhouse. Winner of the NCSA Piatigorsky Memorial Award and Concerto Competition, and an honorary scholarship to Juilliard, he was a two-time regional winner of the National Federation of Music Clubs Young Artists Competition. Formerly principal cellist of the Annapolis (Maryland) and Terre Haute (Indiana) Symphonies, he has performed widely as a concerto soloist with the Indianapolis Philharmonic, the Bismark-Mandan Orchestra, the Tampa Bay Chamber Orchestra, the Fox Valley Symphony, and the Annapolis Symphony.

Learn more about tomorrow night's concert in Greencastle's Banner-Graphic or by clicking here.

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