Todd Levy

clarinet

Todd Levy is principal clarinet of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and The Santa Fe Opera Orchestra. He’s a four-time Grammy Award winner, and he’s performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall and the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York City, with the Israel Philharmonic, and at the White House in Washington, DC.

As a chamber musician, Levy has appeared with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, Ying, Miró, and Miami string quartets; with James Levine, Christoph Eschenbach, and Mitsuko Uchida; and at festivals such as the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Marlboro Music Festival. He was also a member of the Naumburg Award–winning Aspen Wind Quintet.

Levy has served as guest principal clarinet for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and frequently for Seiji Ozawa and Riccardo Muti in Japan with the Tokyo Opera Nomori Orchestra and Mito Chamber Orchestra.

An avid supporter of new music, Levy has given world-premiere performances of concertos or chamber works by such composers as John Harbison, Joan Tower, Peter Schickele, Paquito D’Rivera, William Bolcom, Morton Subotnick, and Marc Neikrug. He performed on the latest release of Neikrug’s chamber work Through Roses with violinist Pinchas Zukerman and actor John Rubinstein and with Neikrug conducting.

As an editor and compiler for various music publishers, Levy’s most recent publications include the compilation French Music for Clarinet (Leduc), three educational books and CDs of clarinet competition works called Clarinet Collection (G. Schirmer), and the new, exclusive print editions and CDs of Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata and Finzi’s Five Bagatelles (Boosey & Hawkes).

Levy’s latest CD for Avie Records, Rhapsodie, features 20th-century classics for clarinet. He’s also recorded Brahms’s clarinet sonatas and works by Schumann for Avie. Additional recordings include more than 20 other orchestral and chamber music CDs for Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Decca, and Naxos.

Todd Levy is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where he studied with David Weber, and an alumnus of the New World Symphony. He serves on the clarinet faculties of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Levy is a Performing Artist for Selmer Paris and Vandoren and plays on Vandoren reeds, mouthpieces, and ligatures and Selmer Signature clarinets.