Guest Artists

Guest Artists

David Finckel, cello

Cellist David Finckel’s multifaceted career as concert performer, recording artist, educator, arts administrator, and cultural entrepreneur places him in the ranks of today’s most influential classical musicians.

He has been hailed as a “world class soloist” (Denver Post) and “one of the top ten, if not top five, cellists in the world today” (Nordwest Zeitung, Germany). In high demand as a chamber musician, David Finckel appears in over one hundred concerts each season in recital with pianist Wu Han and as cellist of the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet at the most prestigious venues and concert series across the United States and around the world. His activities as a concerto soloist include performances and recordings of the Dvorák Concerto, John Harbison Concerto, and Augusta Read Thomas’s Ritual Incantations.

In addition to his distinction as one of classical music’s most accomplished performers, David Finckel has established a reputation for his dynamic and innovative approach to the recording studio. In 1997, David Finckel and Wu Han launched ArtistLed, classical music’s first musician-directed and Internet-based recording company, whose catalogue of twelve albums has won widespread critical acclaim. David Finckel’s recording for the ArtistLed label of the Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev sonatas received BBC Music Magazine’s coveted “Editor’s Choice” award. This season, ArtistLed releases its thirteenth recording, an album of clarinet trios by Beethoven, Brahms, and Max Bruch, with clarinetist David Shifrin.

David Finckel and Wu Han have served as Artistic Directors of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 2004. They are also the founders and Artistic Directors of Music@Menlo, a chamber music festival and institute in Silicon Valley that has garnered international acclaim since its inception in 2003.

David Finckel has achieved universal renown for his passionate commitment to nurturing the careers of countless young artists through a wide array of education initiatives. For many years, he taught alongside the late Isaac Stern at Carnegie Hall and the Jerusalem Music Center. In 2009, under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Finckel and Wu Han established chamber music training workshops for young artists in Korea and Taiwan, intensive residency programs designed to bring student musicians into contact with an elite artist-faculty.