KAREN BENTLEY
Violinist

Karen Bentley is active as a violinist, violist, conductor and pianist. She has concertized throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada, and Russia where she performed Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the Beethoven Violin Concerto. She was in the Bay Area progressive rock band Tesseract and has several recordings of original music including Electric Diamond, Weeping Angel, Konzerto and Succubus by Stuart Diamond, and Ariel View. She collaborates with percussionist Ian Dogole of Global Fusion in a variety of musical styles merging violin, viola and Norwegian hardingfele with African talking drum, udu, dumbek, mbira and other percussion instruments from around the globe. A champion of contemporary music, she has premiered numerous compositions for violin and piano, solo violin, and violin with electronics. Ms. Bentley has toured with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Barbra Streisand's 1994 concert tour, the New York Philharmonic and the Bolshoi Ballet. She attended Indiana University where she studied with Josef Gingold and Yuval Yaron. Other teachers include Camilla Wicks, Nathan Milstein, Glenn Dicterow and Jean Jacques Kantorow.

She has been concertmaster of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie Kammerorchester as well as the New York String Orchestra under Alexander Schneider. During the summers she has participated in the June in Buffalo Composers Seminar, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Olympic Music Festival, the Tanglewood Festival, and the Next Generation Festival in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Recently, she has performed with Paul Dresher's Electro-Acoustic Band and was Associate Concertmaster of the Monterey County Symphony as well as conductor of the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra Preparatory Orchestra. She has conducted the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra on numerous occasions. Ms. Bentley received a grant from the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley for the world premiere of Swedish composer Ole Saxe's Dance Suite for Solo Violin, and will perform the world premiere of Mr. Saxe's Dance Suite for Solo Violin and Orchestra with the Redwood Symphony on April 21, 2002.