About

Hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for his “flawless technique and keen musicality,” cellist Coleman Itzkoff enjoys a diverse career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator. Recent season highlights include solo performances with the Houston Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, American Youth Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and chamber music performances at Caramoor, YellowBarn, Union College, and Marlboro Music Festival. Coleman demonstrates versatility and command of a wide variety of musical styles, equally comfortable with Renaissance and Baroque music played on period instruments as he is with the eclectic and evermore technically challenging music of today. 

A passionate proponent of new music and interdisciplinary collaboration, Coleman Itzkoff has premiered over 100 contemporary works in the last five years, working closely with some of the great composers of today, including Jörg Widmann, Brett Dean, Tan Dun, Vivian Fung, Steven Mackey, and Matthew Aucoin, to name a few.  He is a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), an ensemble of seventeen singers, dancers, and instrumentalists whose focus is on creating and producing a body of discipline-colliding work combining traditional and experimental artistic processes. With that group, Itzkoff will serve as co-artistic director of the Ojai Festival in 2022 and present work at the American Repertory Theater, Union College, Harvard University, National Sawdust, and elsewhere. Through and beyond his work with AMOC, Coleman has begun pushing into the areas of dancing and acting, most notably in his roles in choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith’s dance-theater pieces ‘Lost Mountain’ and ‘Broken Theatre’, the latter of which will be presented as a feature-length film in festivals around the world (to be announced shortly). Upcoming performances of this nature also include the AMOC productions of ‘The No One’s Rose’ and ‘Waiting’, as well as a tour of the Southern United States of ‘Broken Theatre’.

Chamber Music is at the heart of Coleman’s musical life, beginning early on with weekly quartet readings with his parents, both professional violinists themselves. At the age of 10, Coleman began attending the Greenwood Music Camp where he began playing with other musicians of his generation and where his love of chamber music deepened. Since that time, he has attended numerous summer music festivals including Aspen Music Festival and School, the International Heifetz Institute, La Jolla SummerFest, YellowBarn, Music@Menlo, and Marlboro Music Festival. He has collaborated in chamber music with such musicians as violinists Pamela Frank, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Cho-Liang Lin, and Glenn Dicterow; soprano Lucy Shelton; cellists David Finckel and Johannes Moser; violist Roger Tapping; and pianists Gil Kalish and Peter Frankl. 

Central to Mr. Itzkoff’s career in music is his dedication to community outreach and education. Wherever in the country he may performing, Coleman always makes a point of engaging in the broader community to bring music to the people, whether it be in schools, senior centers and nursing homes, or hospitals. He has received several grants and awards for these purposes, including the Sviatoslav Richter Grant for Music Outreach from Rice University, the Roman Goronok Fellowship from the 2016 Irving Klein Competition, and, in 2015, the Cleveland Clinic Arts and Medicine Award for his engaging talks and accessible performances for clinic patients. Additionally, Coleman is a devoted and dynamic educator of young musicians, and has taught and given masterclasses across the US at such institutions as the International Heifetz Institute, the Lev Aronson Cello Festival, Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center, NYU, and Harvard University. Coleman has continued this work in the time of COVID, partnering with PMHU’s ‘Vital Sounds Partnership Grants’ to bring live, one-on-one performances to hospital patients across the country, from Los Angeles to Boston. 

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Coleman Itzkoff was born in 1992 into a musical family and began playing cello at the age of 4. His major teachers have been Eric Kim, Desmond Hoebig, Timothy Eddy, and Ralph Kirshbaum. He holds a BM from Rice University, an MM from the Thornton School of Music at USC, and an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School. Coleman performs on a 1730 Gennaro Gagliano cello, generously loaned to him by the Amatius Foundation of Austin, TX.