Maya Bennardo

Described by I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration” and performing “with a welcoming and dynamic spirit,” andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire through performing rarely heard works and commissioning emerging composers. The “genre-busting” (Midwest Records) New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, first played to an eager crowd on Fire Island in the summer of 2012 and has since commissioned over thirty works. andPlay’s performances have been described as “sheer virtuosity” (Cinemusical), “otherworldly” (New York Music Daily) and “an awful lot of fun for people who gravitate towards stark, edgy harmonies and textures” (Lucid Culture).

andPlay has collaborated closely with numerous composers, including Robert Honstein, Scott Wollschleger, Clara Iannotta, David Bird, Bethany Younge and Sky Macklay, and consider those relationships to be an integral part of their artistic process. Honstein praises the duo for their "consummate professionalism, fierce musicality and an unflappable good spirit." Their current season includes the release of their debut album, playlist on New Focus Recordings, ten world premieres, including works by Carolyn Chen, Matt Evans, Andrew McIntosh, Shawn Jaeger, and Adam Roberts, and performances in Columbus, New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

andPlay was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Concert Artists Guild Victor Emaleh Competition and was the recipient of a 2016 CMA Classical Commissioning grant with composer Ravi Kittappa, made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Recent highlights include a five-city tour in Sweden performing their Translucent Harmonies program, appearances on the Oh My Ears Festival (Phoenix) and Re:Sound Festival (Cleveland), and a recording residency at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY). The duo has also performed at venues including the Center for New Music (San Francisco), Scandinavia House (New York), Roulette (New York), Monk Space (Los Angeles), Short North Stage (Columbus), and Aftershock Theater (Pittsburgh).

The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet's beginnings in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers representing multiple aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. They have appeared on prestigious series such as the New York Phil Biennial, Wien Modern (Austria), the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (Shanghai, China), Edgefest (Ann Arbor, MI), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Aldeburgh Music (UK), and Lo Spririto della musica di Venezia (La Fenice Theater, Italy). Mivos is invested in commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet, striving to work closely with composers over extended periods of time; recently Mivos has collaborated on new works with Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Dan Blake (Jerome Commission), Mark Barden (Wien Modern Festival Commission), Richard Carrick (Fromm Commission), George Lewis (ECLAT Festival Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA Commission), Kate Soper, Scott Wollschleger, Patrick Higgins (ZS), and poet/musician Saul Williams. Every year, the quartet additionally awards the Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, established to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers, and the I-Creation prize, a competition for composers of Chinese descent. Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is also committed to working with guest artists, exploring multi-media projects involving live video and electronics, and performing improvised music. In addition to collaborations with the aforementioned Blake and Williams, this has led to performances with artists such as Ambrose Akinmusire, Ned Rothenberg, Timucin Sahin, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Nate Wooley. The quartet is the recipient of the 2019 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music.

In addition to their performance season, Mivos is active in education and has conducted workshops at UC Berkeley, Duke University, CUNY Graduate Center, Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey). The members of Mivos are: violinists Olivia De Prato and Maya Bennardo, violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya, and cellist Tyler J. Borden.

The Bennardo/Larson Duo is a contemporary classical duo committed to the performance of forward thinking works for violin and piano. Comprised of Maya Bennardo (violin) and Karl Larson (piano), the duo was formed in 2016 when they undertook the task of learning and performing Charles Ives’s complete works for violin and piano. Since then, the duo has become known for their annual ‘Ives of March’ concerts, which take place in New York City every March 15. Bennardo and Larson are both fierce advocates of contemporary music, and the bulk of their programming is intended to illuminate new repertoire for their instrumentation along with intrepid works from the past that laid the foundation for our current musical climate. 

During the 2017-2018 concert season, the duo has been featured on the Bowerbird Series in Philadelphia, PA andthe Toledo Museum of Art’s Great Performances Series in Toledo, OH. They have also presented performances at the Music Mansion in Providence, RI, The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn, NY, and Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn, NY. Their programming this season has featured multiple works by Charles Ives, Morton Feldman’s monumental For John Cage, and a wind's whisper, a program featuring works by John Cage, Michael Pisaro, Eva Maria Houben, and two newly commissioned pieces by Adrian Knight and Kristofer Svensson.

Beyond the concert stage, Bennardo and Larson are passionate educators, offering workshops in contemporary string and piano technique for performers and composers. This season they are offering masterclasses and performances at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University.