Spring Concert at the Chapel of Rest Features Ciompi Quartet with Clarinetist Doug Miller

LENOIR, NC (April 26, 2017)…The Chapel of Rest will host its Spring Concert on Sunday, May 7 at 4pm, and the public is cordially invited. The concert will include music by Mozart, Benjamin Britten and Antonin Dvorak, and will be followed by a champagne reception with the artists.

The Ciompi Quartet was founded at Duke University in 1965 by the renowned Italian violinist Giorgio Ciompi. All its members are professors at Duke and play a leading role in its cultural life, in addition to traveling throughout the year for performances. In a career that includes many hundreds of concerts and spans five continents, the Ciompi Quartet has developed a reputation for performances of real intelligence and musical sophistication, and for a warm, unified sound that is enhanced by each player’s strong individual voice. With a maturity and insight born of wide experience, the Ciompi Quartet projects the heart and soul of the music in a repertoire that ranges from well-known masterpieces to works by today’s most communicative composers.

Recent concerts have ranged across the U.S. including North Carolina’s Eastern Music Festival and Highlands Chamber Music Festival, and abroad from China to France, Italy, Germany, Prague, Serbia and Albania. The group’s latest recordings are on Toccata Classics and Naxos, and on numerous other discs with music from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven up through the present.

Lenoir clarinetist Doug Miller first played with the Western Piedmont Symphony over 50 years ago while still a member of the Lenoir High School Band, and has been Principal clarinetist with the Orchestra for 37 consecutive years. He made his New York debut in Carnegie Recital Hall in 1973 as winner of the Artists International Management Competition and has performed with many orchestras and chamber groups. Doug has been a member of the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, the Mozarteum Festival Orchestra in Salzburg, the International Hindemith Festival in Los Angeles, the Wintergreen Music Festival and the Kalmen Opperman Clarinet Choir in New York.

Locally, he has played with the Roanoke Symphony, Roanoke Opera, the Winston-Salem Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, the Greensboro Symphony, the Broyhill Chamber Ensemble, and with the Appalachian Woodwind Quintet. He joined the faculty at Appalachian State University in 1980 and has started his 38th year of teaching there. He may be heard on Richard Stoltzman’s “Aria” album on RCA and has also recorded on the Centaur label.

The Chapel of Rest is located nine miles north of Lenoir on Highway 268, adjacent to the campus of the Patterson School. Admission to the concert is $15 and includes the champagne reception with the artists. For more information, call 828 / 758-0906.