Background
Todd Levy is the principal clarinetist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra, and participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. A four-time Grammy Award-winner, Levy has performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall, the Mostly Mozart Festival, with the Israel Philharmonic, and at the White House. An active chamber musician, he has appeared with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, Ying, Miro, and Miami string quartets; James Levine, Christoph Eschenbach, Mitsuko Uchida, Marc Neikrug, Pinchas Zuckerman, Susan Graham, and Sasha Cooke. He has also been a participant at the Marlboro Music Festival for four summers, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival for the last 20 years, and was a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Aspen Wind Quintet.
Mr. Levy is in demand as a guest principal clarinetist with the top American orchestras, and has played principal clarinet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and frequently for Seiji Ozawa and Riccardo Muti in Japan at the Tokyo Opera Nomori and the Mito Chamber Orchestra.
An avid supporter of new music, he has performed world premiere concerti or chamber works by composers such as John Harbison, Joan Tower, Peter Schickele, Paquito D’Rivera, Kaija Saariaho, Morton Subotnick, and Marc Neikrug and performs on the latest release of Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses chamber work with violinist Pinchas Zuckerman, actor John Rubenstein, and the composer conducting.
Mr. Levy’s latest solo CD for the Avie label, Rhapsodie, features 20th Century classics for clarinet. He has also recorded the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas and Schumann pieces for Avie. His newest chamber music recording, the first complete recording of Walton’s Façade for the Naxos label, will be available in September of 2022.
As an editor and compiler for publishers Boosey and Hawkes, Leduc, and G. Schirmers, Mr. Levy’s most significant recent publications are the 2020 release of the compilation French Music for Clarinet by Leduc, three educational book/CDs of clarinet competition works entitled the Clarinet Collection for G. Schirmer, the new exclusive print editions/CDs of the Bernstein Clarinet Sonata and the Finzi Five Bagatelles for Boosey and Hawkes, and over 20 other orchestral and chamber music CDs on the Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, and Decca labels.
A Performing Artist for Selmer-Paris and Vandoren, Mr. Levy plays on Vandoren reeds, mouthpieces, and ligatures, and Selmer Signature clarinets. He is also on the faculty of UW-Milwaukee and a former faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School where he studied with David Weber, and is an alumnus of the New World Symphony.