Bergman, Sam (1976-Present)

He is a violist born in Boston, Massachusetts who started playing the violin when he was 4 years old studied viola and violin with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His family moved when he was 10 and he grew up in small-town Pennsylvania and that summer he attended a small chamber music camp called Greenwood, which he returns to annually as a faculty member.

He started to switch his interest to the viola in 1988 after meeting up with the counselor and viola player Ken Freed at Greenwood., who also later became a member of the Minnesota Orchestra. He took further studies at Oberlin Conservatory during his college years with the violist Jeff Irvine and his wife Lynne Ramsey, who is also Associate Principal with the Cleveland Orchestra.

He became a member of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra before becoming a member of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2000, where he serves as Acting Assistant Principal Viola.

He has been a producer, writer and host of at least 40 narrated shows for the Minnesota Orchestra since 2005, often as part of the orchestra’s Inside the Classics series with the conductor Sarah Hicks. He and Sarah have created several programs that have looked at the impact of music on the human brain, the history of protest music in the concert hall and a celebration of LGBTQ composers. In 2011-12 he assisted in leading The Microcommission Project which brought a new symphonic work by Judd Greenstein to life with the help of over 400 small donors. In 2018 he and the soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw fo-founded the concert series Outpost.

Outside of his work with the Minnesota Orchestra he is the Principal Viola of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. From there he taken several works of composers that have been featured back to Minneapolis where they have become part of the programming of the Minnesota Orchestra. He is also a regular performer with the IRIS Orchestra, has been a guest musician with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and substitute musician with the Atlanta Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Recordings he has performed on include “Come Back…Be Here (Taylor’s Version)” from Red by Taylor Swift.

In the field of musical education he has been a regular teacher at New Hampshire’s Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music and a visiting faculty member of St. Olaf College He has been a governing board member of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM).

Sources:

Bergman, Sam (1976-Present)

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