Cellist Erik Ásgeirsson
has been on the concert stage from a very young age. At age eleven, he was
performing regularly at Orchestra Hall as a member of the senior Detroit
Symphony Civic Orchestra, becoming its Principal Cellist in 2001 under the
direction of Charles Burke and guests Izhak Perlmann and Pascal Tortelier and,
with the Detroit Symphony Civic Quartet, winning first place in the 2003 and
2004 American String Teachers Association State Chamber Music Competitions.
Erik has since performed
at Festival Music Alp in France,
Encore School
for Strings in Ohio and Aria
International Summer
Academy in London,
Ontario, as well as Detroit area venues such as the Grosse Pointe
Chamber Music Society, Troy Public Library and Brunch with Bach at the Detroit
Institute of the Arts. The winner of numerous youth competitions, including the
Louis Potter Cello Competition and the Tuesday Musicale of Detroit, Birmingham
Musicale and Pontiac Musicale Scholarship Competitions, he has been featured as
concerto soloist with the Birmingham-Bloomfield, Rochester, Dearborn, Livonia
and Warren Symphony Orchestras.
Erik’s cello studies
began at age six with Irina Tikhonova,
continuing with Paul Wingert, Thomas Landschoot, Erling Blöndahl Bengtsson and
Steven Doane. He has received two Rislov Foundation awards in support of summer
studies with renowned teachers Orlando Cole, Steven Geber and Philippe Muller.
An avid chamber musician, he and his piano trio at Eastman have received
coaching from Mikhail Kopelman, former first violinist of the Borodin quartet,
and have performed in a series of outreach concerts at the Rochester Institute
of Technology and the Rochester
School for the Arts. In
2005, he served as Principal Cellist in an Eastman production of the colossal
“Goethe’s Faust” by Schumann.
In the 2006-2007
academic year, Erik was a featured soloist among international exchange students
of the Freiburg Hochschule in Konzerthaus Freiburg and performed as a member of
Camerata Academica Freiburg in Germany
and France,
while in the studio of Christoph Henkel. He was awarded the Bachelor of Music
degree in Cello Performance of the Eastman School of Music in May of 2008,
graduating “with highest distinction”. A recipient of a teaching fellowship
(English as second language) at the University
of Cologne, Erik has been offered
admission to the masters degree program in cello performance at Hochschule fur
Musik in Cologne
in the studio of Maria Kliegel.
Erik is the son of
pianist Pauline Martin and DTE engineer Haukur Asgeirsson, and brother to Leif,
a senior at the Cranbrook
Kingswood School
in Bloomfield Hills. In his spare time, Erik has been a network technician for
Resnet at the University
of Rochester, and enjoys
photography, running and traveling. Having spent two summers in intensive
language study in Iceland,
he speaks Icelandic, German and English.