SOLOIST SPOTLIGHT: BRIDGET KIBBEY
Called the “Yo-Yo Ma of the harp,” by Vogue Senior Editor Corey Seymour, Bridget Kibbey is in demand for her innovative, virtuosic performances that expand the expressive range of the harp. As a soloist and collaborator with today’s top artists, she crosses genres to emphasize and elevate the harp’s role through centuries and cultures of music.
As The New York Times says, “…she made it seem as though her instrument had been waiting all its life to explode with the gorgeous colors and energetic figures she was getting from it.”
Kibbey is the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Salon de Virtuosi SONY Recording Grant. She is the winner of the Premiere Prix at the Journées de les Harpes Competition in Arles, France, the Concert Artists Guild competition, and the Juilliard School’s Peter Mennin Prize for Artistic Excellence and Leadership. She is a graduate of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) and is featured annually with the CMSLC. She made her NPR TinyDesk debut in 2020. Kibbey’s debut album Love is Come Again was listed as a top ten debut by Time Out New York, and she’s been featured as a soloist on Front Row Washington, A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts, WQXR, and WRTI, among others.
With the harp as her muse, Bridget Kibbey is sought after for her keen curatorial ideas through music. She currently tours several projects of her own conception — ranging from French Masterworks of the Belle Époque, to the riches of Baroque Counterpoint, to popular folk music from South America, to Sephardic and Persian traditions.
Kibbey’s 2021/22 season is a cornucopia of these cross-genre projects at series and festivals across the United States. She presents concertinos of Debussy, Ravel, and Caplet at the La Jolla and Savannah Music Festivals. She performs her own adaptations of J.S. Bach’s keyboard concerti and sonatas, re-imagined alongside the Dover Quartet. She tours duo recitals with the Iranian Singer Mahsa Vahdat, exploring the poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Vahdat. In a new partnership with violinist Alexi Kenney, the duo explores the works of Bach, Dowland, Saint-Saëns, Falla and Currier, from the most virtuosic to the most intimate.
Also during the 2021/22 season, Carnegie Hall presents Kibbey as bandleader/soloist in her Bach to Brazil project via CityWide, their free concert series that celebrates the sounds from around the globe that make New York City so vibrant. Bach to Brazil includes newly-commissioned works that highlight the Nuevo Latino luminaries living in NYC alongside the folk masters that inspired them in a mash-up of maracatú, frevo, chorinho, bossa nova, joropo, tango, and cumbia from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela. Kibbey performs the project with Latin Grammy-winning percussionist Samuel Torres and clarinetist Louis Arques.
This season, Bridget Kibbey also delves into her passion for Brazilian popular music with a new harp concerto by Brazilian composer João Luiz Rezende, performing with A Far Cry in Boston’s Jordan Hall. The concerto for harp, strings, and percussion explores the evolution of the dance forms maracatú and frevo from Pernambuco, Brazil. It has been commissioned by four American Orchestras and premiered with the Orlando Philharmonic and Music Director Eric Jacobsen in fall 2019.
Kibbey has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician in festivals across the globe, including Schloss Elmau, Pelotas Festival, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, International Festival d’Avesnois, Aspen Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Spoleto Festival, Big Ears Knoxville, Chamber Music Northwest, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Bay Chamber Concerts, Savannah Music Festival and Music@Menlo, among others. LEARN MORE
