FREE Open Rehearsal: KIAN RAVAEI’s World Premiere
Go behind the scenes and observe CMNW’s world-class musicians working together to put the finishing touches on the music for upcoming performances.
Summer Festival artists take the stage to rehearse Kian Ravaei’s bold new work for flute, violin, and electronics that was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest!
An informal Q&A follows the rehearsal.
All Open Rehearsals are sponsored by Debbie & George Olsen.
Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Wednesday, 7/9 • 11:00 am PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- KIAN RAVAEI (b. 1999) World Premiere “iPod Variations” for flute, violin & electronics (2025)
KIAN RAVAEI iPod Variations for flute, violin & electronics
In iPod Variations, I return to the music I loved as a teenager in an attempt to recreate my musical DNA. Like a shuffled playlist, each variation juxtaposes the musical styles of two different artists that were on my iPod, a technology that already evokes a previous era. It may seem unusual to pair Hendrix with Handel, or Bob Dylan with Deadmau5, but in my teenage years I didn’t grasp the importance of historical context—it was all just music to me. Here, I put listeners in the same position through eclectic contrasts.
By adding to the flute and violin soloists an arsenal of recorded instruments—harpsichord, fretless bass, Hammond B-3 organ, Persian tār, and video game sound chips, to name a few—I tried to condense ten years of listening into roughly ten minutes of music, paying homage to guitar-shredding heroes (I, II, IV), jazz idols (III, V), and electronic music masters (II, VI). Like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the piece ends with a return to the opening aria—but now in an idealized rendering, as though seen through the lens of a nostalgic memory.
—© Kian Ravaei
Artists
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Alexi Kenney
Violin
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Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated artists and musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.
Alexi has performed as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and San Diego symphonies, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Gulbenkian Orchestra, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. This season, he plays the complete violin sonatas of Robert Schumann with Amy Yang on period instruments at the Frick Collection, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Phillips Collection.
He continues to tour his project Shifting Ground in collaboration with the new media artist Xuan, which intersperses works for solo violin by J.S. Bach with pieces by Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Salina Fisher, Nicola Matteis, Angélica Negrón, and Paul Wiancko.
Alexi is a founding member of the two-cello quartet Owls, hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times. He regularly performs at chamber music festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto. He is an alum of the Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow made in Port Townsend, WA by Charles Espey in 2024.
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Tara Helen O’Connor
Flute
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Tara Helen O’Connor, who Art Mag has said “so embodies perfection on the flute that you’ll forget she is human,” is an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, a two-time Grammy Award nominee, and a recipient of the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award. A Wm.S. Haynes artist, she is a season artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She is professor of flute at the Yale School of Music and is the Artistic Director of the “Music from Angel Fire” Festival and in 2026, the Essex Winter Series.
Tara has also appeared on numerous film and television soundtracks including Barbie, Respect, The Joker, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Only Murders in the Building, and Schmigadoon! Festival appearances include the Bravo! Vail festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Music@Menlo, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Rockport Music, the Great Mountains Music Festival, and Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival.
A charismatic performer noted for her artistic depth, brilliant technique and colorful tone spanning every musical era, O’Connor has collaborated with such distinguished artists as vocalists Jennifer Johnson Cano, Susanna Phillips and Dawn Upshaw, violinist Jaime Laredo, clarinetist David Shifrin, guitarist Eliot Fisk, and pianists Jeremy Denk, Peter Serkin, and Stephen Prutsman, and with such revered ensembles as the Emerson, Orion, and St. Lawrence string quartets.
Tara has appeared on A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts, PBS’ Live from Lincoln Center and has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings and Bridge Records.
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Kian Ravaei
Composer, Protégé Alumni
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Composer Kian Ravaei (b. 1999) takes tone painting to a new level, synthesizing diverse inspirations into evocative musical portraits. Whether he is composing a string quartet inspired by wonders of the natural world, electronic music that evokes the pulsating energy of late-night dance clubs, or a symphonic poem that draws from the Iranian music of his ancestral heritage, he takes listeners on a spellbinding tour of humanity’s most deeply felt emotions.
The 2025-26 season sees a variety of performances, including the New York premiere of Ravaei’s Gulistan at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as two new string quartets for the Abeo Quartet and Sheffield Chamber Players. He has been named a 2025-26 Classeek Ambassador Programme Artist, and will partake in a one-year career enhancement program alongside six of the world’s most promising classical musicians.
From Carnegie Hall to Pierre Boulez Saal, sought-after musicians such as Grammy Award winner Fleur Barron, Performance Today Classical Woman of the Year Lara Downes, and New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill have brought Ravaei’s music to global stages. The Alexander String Quartet capped their 44-year career with a farewell tour that featured Ravaei’s seven-movement string quartet The Little Things. His works have been commissioned by prominent chamber music organizations—among them Seattle Chamber Music Society and Chamber Music Northwest—as well as the American Composers Orchestra, where he is currently a resident CoLABoratory Fellow.
Notable honors include a Copland House CULTIVATE Fellowship—during which he participated in an emerging composers institute at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home—as well as commissioning grants from Chamber Music America, New Music USA, and the Barlow Endowment. Ravaei’s rapidly expanding catalog has earned him first prize awards in the New York Youth Symphony First Music Chamber Music Competition, the Foundation for Modern Music Robert Avalon Competition, and the Zodiac International Music Competition.
Born to Iranian immigrants, Ravaei maintains close ties to the Iranian community in his hometown of Los Angeles. Many of his works combine the ornamented melodies of Iranian classical music with the colorful harmonies of Western classical music. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and pianist Kunal Lahiry commissioned Ravaei to compose a Persian-language setting of the feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad for their U.S. tour, culminating in a sold-out Carnegie Hall recital. A passionate speaker, Ravaei was a featured lecturer at the UCLA Iranian Music Lecture Series, where he discussed his multicultural upbringing and its deep-seated influence on his music.
Just days into the COVID-19 lockdown, Ravaei began a daily ritual of playing a Bach chorale at the piano and composing an original chorale in response. What started as a way to ground himself during a period of emotional turbulence blossomed into an artistic reawakening. Over the course of one year and three hundred sixty-five chorales, Ravaei cultivated a “rich harmonic idiom” (Washington Classical Review) rooted in a centuries-long tradition.
As part of his residencies at chamber music festivals across the Western hemisphere, Ravaei engages with local audiences through educational presentations, musical performances, and community events. He was a resident composer at Chamber Music Northwest through their Protégé Project, and later became the inaugural composer-in-residence at Sunkiss’d Mozart. Through a trailblazing partnership between the Wyoming International Chamber Music Festival and the Tenby International Music Festival, Ravaei serves as composer-in-residence of both festivals, helping to foster musical dialogue between the United States and United Kingdom.
Millions of classical radio listeners have heard Ravaei’s music on the airwaves, from New York’s WQXR to Los Angeles’s KUSC. As part of Classical California’s 2024 Ultimate Playlist, the nation’s largest public radio listenership ranked Ravaei’s piece Latif in 26th place—sandwiched between Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto—making him the only living composer in the top 30. His music has been featured on award-winning radio programs such as APM’s Performance Today and WNYC’s New Sounds, as well as his personally curated streaming station for Classical Music Indy.
With numerous commercial recordings, Ravaei has earned critical acclaim from outlets including Gramophone, Bandcamp Daily, and I CARE IF YOU LISTEN. His compositions appear on albums such as Lara Downes’ This Land—a poignant reflection on American identity—and Tallā Rouge’s genre-bending debut Shapes in Collective Space. Fans of electronic dance music will hear Ravaei’s orchestration in the official orchestral arrangement of Wooli & Codeko’s “Crazy (feat. Casey Cook),” which has garnered over two hundred thousand views across streaming platforms.
Choreographers have tapped into Ravaei’s music as a source of inspiration, transforming his vivid sound worlds into dance. They include Marla Phelan—whose innovative fusion of dance and video projections set to Ravaei’s immersive electronic score premiered at the Juilliard Future Stages Festival—and Carly Topazio, who captivated audiences with her choreography to Ravaei’s Family Photos during a joint performance by Art of Elan and The Rosin Box Project. Most recently, Ravaei and choreographer Annie Kahane completed a three-year project to combine Persian and Jewish musical and dance traditions, which debuted at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.Inspired by the generosity of his own teachers—celebrated composers such as Valerie Coleman, Richard Danielpour, and Derrick Skye—Ravaei pays forward his musical training by empowering others to embrace their creativity. He recently launched the Wales-Wyoming Workshops Composer Fellowship, a tuition-free program for early-career composers from the U.S. and U.K. to gain transatlantic exposure through performance and recording opportunities. In previous years, Ravaei taught composition to historically underserved students as a Composer Teaching Artist Fellow for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and also held a teaching position at the Indiana University Jacobs Composition Academy, where he mentored composers aged 17 to 70.
Ravaei’s own musical journey has led him eastward from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music to the heart of New York City, where he is currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School.