Stephen Redfield
Violinist Stephen Redfield, D.M.A., is a member of the University of Southern Mississippi School of Music faculty, where he performs with the Mississippi Chamber Circle and the Impromptu Piano Trio. Throughout the year Stephen acts as concertmaster of the Santa Fe Pro Musica, and each summer plays with the Victoria Bach Festival; his performances as concertmaster and soloist there have been produced on discs and broadcast nationally. He has also often led the Oregon Bach Festival orchestra, where he has participated in numerous recordings, including the Grammy Award-winning disc “Credo.” In addition, Stephen is concertmaster of the Arizona Bach Festival, was the long-time principal second violin of the Sunriver Music Festival, and served for five years as Assistant Concertmaster of the Austin Symphony Orchestra.
Stephen has particularly extensive experience in the choral-orchestral repertoire: over his 30 years with the Oregon Bach Festival, he performed the majority of this repertoire with Helmuth Rilling (including recording eight works, and premiering two commissioned pieces). He is concertmaster for Craig Hella Johnson and the coral ensemble Conspirare. He has led a period B Minor Mass for Joshua Habermann and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and was concertmaster for Robert Shaw in the Berlioz Requiem and for Fiora Contino in Haydn’s Creation and the St. John Passion.
Stephen is an active chamber musician throughout the United States and abroad. He has collaborated with artists Andre-Michel Schub, Peter Wiley and Mark Peskanov. His Cayuga Quartet was a winner of the Coleman and Monterey Chamber Music Competitions and earned an Aspen Quartet Fellowship. In addition to the festivals mentioned before, Stephen has been featured in chamber concerts at Loon Lake Live!, Taos Soundscapes, Serenata of Santa Fe, Quad-Cities Mozart Festival, and the Anchorage Festival, among others. He coached with the Cleveland Quartet and Abram Loft, the Emerson Quartet and Earl Carlyss, and the LaSalle and Audubon Quartets.
He frequently performs as a soloist; during 2009, Mendelssohn’s 200th birth-year, he performed both Mendelssohn violin concertos (and also toured with his three sonatas). His specialty is 18th and early 19th-Century concertos and concert pieces, often leading the ensemble while playing the solo. Highlights include Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, each of the Bach Concertos, and selected concertos and works by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. He also performed a Western-U.S. premiere of the Michael Daugherty’s “Ladder to the Moon.”
Stephen has also developed a specialization in period performance. He performs regularly as a Baroque violinist, including as a member of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and he has led the ensembles Albuquerque Baroque Players and Nashville’s Music City Baroque. Stephen’s Baroque chamber music credits include concerts with Marion Verbruggen, Mary Springfels, Elizabeth Blumenstock and Kenneth Slowik., and with the Newberry Consort and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. As a member of the Sebastian Ensemble, with harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh, Stephen travelled twice to Lima, Peru, for the Festival Internacional de Música Antigua. Specializing in J.S. Bach’s Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord Obligato, this period performance group has toured throughout the United States as well as in Spain, Japan and Cuba.
