Percussionist Mike Truesdell really enjoys working in the sinfonietta setting.  The texture is dense enough to offer composers a wide variety of possibilities, while still giving space for each player to be themselves.  Don’t get him wrong, he really enjoys other kinds of performing.  As a soloist he was the 2nd-prize winner of the 2010 TROMP International Percussion Competition in the Netherlands, and continues to maintain an active schedule of solo recitals and master classes. chamber music, and orchestral performances. To prepare for his work with SINFONIETTA, he has refined his chamber music skills in a DVD/CD/live concert celebration of Elliott Carter’s 103rd (and unfortunately, final) birthday, with the composer in attendance, and recently recorded Charles Wuorinen’s cantata It Happens Like This, for future release, with the composer conducting.  If you like what you hear in this group, you can hear Mike’s recordings with Renée Fleming, Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, John Zorn, Gil Evans Project, Ensemble LPR, among others.

 

To help form the next great sinfonietta, Mike is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University, where he is the keyboard percussion instructor, and Columbia University. In the spring of 2015, Mike was Interim Professor of Percussion at Furman University and assumed the same role at Lawrence University in the spring of 2013.  He is on faculty at the Zeltsman Marimba Festival, nief-norf Summer Festival, and serves as founder and director of the Wildcat Percussion Camp for middle and high-school percussionists while maintaining a private studio.