Jojatu, Mihail

Cellist from Bucharest, Romania, who started out on the piano and violin before gravitating to the cello at eight or nine years of age. He attended the Bucharest Academy of Music, the Bucharest National University of Music, and the George Enescu High School of Music. For seven months, he was a member of the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Bucharest.

In 1996, he relocated to the United States, joining his brother Adrian, a bassoonist in Boston, Massachusetts. He furthered his education at the Boston Conservatory of Music, BostonUniversity, and the Tanglewood Music Center. His teachers included Jules Eskin, Ronald Feldman, and Bernard Greenhouse.

In 2000, he joined the Orchestra of Indian Hill and was their principal cellist until 2001. Other groups with whom he has worked include the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Cello Quartet, the Boston Pops, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Kalistos Chamber Orchestra, the LiveARTS String Quartet, the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, the Longy Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of Indian Hill, the Rhode Island College Symphony Orchestra, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and the Triptych String Trio.

He beat out over 200 aspiring cellists to win a seat in the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2001 and played his first concert with them on 15^th January 2002.

On 14^th September 2002, he was one of four musicians to give the world premiere of T.J. Anderson’s Game Play at the St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

He took part in the Kalistos Chamber Orchestra’s season finale on 9^th May 2003 at First and Second Church in Boston, where he performed Cello Concerto in D by Franz Joseph Haydn.

On 4^th September 2003, he teamed up with Tamara Smirnova at West Cummington Congregational Church for a recital of duos for violin and cello by George Frideric Handel and Zoltan Kodaly.

He was a guest soloist of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra on 1^st November 2003 when he played Antonin Dvorak’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra. On 30^th January 2005, he reprised this concerto at the Littleton Performing Arts Center with the Orchestra of Indian Hill.

He soloed on Ernst Bloch’s Schelomo for Solo Cello and Orchestra with the Rhode Island College Symphony Orchestra at the John Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts on 4^th December 2006.

On 20^th January 2008, he and violinist Haldan Martinson joined forces with the Orchestra of Indian Hill at Littleton High School, where they interpreted the Concerto for Violin and Cello of Johannes Brahms.

Members of the BSO, including Mihail, were invited to supply some of the music, specifically Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet for Senator Ted Kennedy’s memorial service on 29^th August 2009.

On 18^th October 2009, the LiveARTS String Quartet delivered the world premiere of Don Krishnaswami’s String Quartet No. 1 in Franklin, Massachusetts.

Mihail revisited some familiar territory on 23^rd October 2009 when he appeared as the featured soloist at the Longy School of Music for a performance of Antonin Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor.

On 11^th November 2009, he gave a master class in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall at Williams College. The Berkshire Symphony Orchestra appeared at Chapin Hall on 13^th November 2009, when Mihailand Haldan reunited for Brahms’ Double Concerto.

In January 2010, he helped co-found the Boston Cello Quartet. They made their debut in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in July 2010. On 9^th August 2010, they appeared in the Ventfort Hall Mansionand Gilded Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts. Their program comprised Tomaso Albioni’s Adagio, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen’s Konzertwalzer, Op. 31, Mozart’s overture from The Marriage of Figaro and Sonata in D major, K. 381, Astor Piazzolla’s La muerte del angel, and Franz Schubert’s Marche Militaire.

He and pianist Wayman Chin participated in the Longy School of Music’s SeptemberFest 2010 when they offered up Samuel Barber’s Cello Sonata, Op. 6.

On 23^rd January 2001, the BCQ appeared at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill where they played music by their own Blaise Dejardin, Mozart, Piazzolla, and Schubert.

Mihail and clarinetist Michael Wayne and pianist Martin Katz gave a recital at the Longy School of Music on 27^th March 2001 that included Brahms’ Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in A minor, Op. 114, Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 119.

On 9^th April 2011, the Orchestra of Indian Hill told the musical story of Don Quixote in three different ways, once with Three Songs of Don Quichotte a Dulcinee by Maurice Ravel, and then again with Don Quixote by Richard Strauss and Suite in G major (Don Quixote) by Georg Philipp Telemann. Mihail played the all-important cello part in the Strauss piece.

The BCQ took the stage in Lillie Auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole on 12^th June 2011, when they played works by Albinoni, Dejardin, Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, and Schubert. The recital included Dejardin’s Variations on a New World.

On 4^th June 2011, Mihail collaborated with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Keith Lockhart on Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Cello, Wind Orchestra and Jazz Ensemble.

The BCQ returned to Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on 29^th July 2011 for an ambitious program that comprised Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune, Dejardin’s Wolfgang Variations, Dvorak’s Humoreska in G, Op. 101, No. 7, the world premiere of Tetsuro Hoshii’s The Waltz of the Black Ants, highlights from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Arvo Part’s Fratres, Rossini’s overture from William Tell, and Patrice Sciortino’s Iber-Amer, Three Dances from Latin America.

On 8^th August 2011, the BCQ opened for Train at Tanglewood, where they performed their own arrangements of songs by the Grammy-winning pop-rock group.

Mihail and pianist Alina Polyakov and violinist Alex Velinson haunted Phillips Recital Hall at GordonCollege on 4^th November 2011, when they played a pair of piano trios by Schubert and Peter IlyichTchaikovsky.

In the field of music education, he has taught at the Boston Conservatory, the Longy School of Music, the Tanglewood Music Center, and Williams College. His students have included Eleanor Blake, Daria Janssen, Kett Chuan Lee, Joanna Morrison, Aristides Rivas, and Ying Jua Wei.

He has also appeared on a handful of recordings: Chris Botti in Boston, Leave Your Sleep by Natalie Merchant, and the soundtrack of ObsCure: The Aftermath.

In 2018 he was presented with a Berklee Alumni Achievement Award.

Sources:

Jojatu, Mihail

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