Michael Ferri was born in Treviglio, Italy in 1995. He began his violin studies at age three in Madison, Wisconsin, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Young Artists Program in 2013 under the tutelage of Paul Kantor and Jaime Laredo. Mr. Ferri is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music degree in Violin Performance with Paul Kantor at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. He has attended prestigious solo, chamber, and orchestral summer programs such as the Aspen Music Festival and School and Encore Chamber Music.
Mr. Ferri performed Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as a result of winning the 2011 Duquesne Young Artist National Concerto Competition, and has had multiple concerto engagements with the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra at Severance Hall. In fall 2011, he performed on NPR‘s celebrated series From the Top.
More recently, Mr. Ferri took first prize in the 2016 Mika Hasler Young Artist Competition, and the 2016 Shepherd School of Music Concerto Competition. Subsequently he performed Béla Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto with Larry Rachleff and the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra in February of 2017. Additionally, Mr. Ferri was invited to take part in Da Camera of Houston’s production of A Proust Sonata, an interdisciplinary concert-theater work conceived and directed by Sarah Rothenberg. There he collaborated with a Tony Award-winning design team to coordinate readings from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to a rendition of Gabriel Fauré’s First Violin Sonata performed with Ms. Rothenberg, for the opening season of the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University.
Mr. Ferri is a recipient of the Itzhak Perlman Endowed Scholarship in Violin, and the Paul Kantor and Larry Rachleff Prize to Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He is a recipient of From the Top’s Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, and the Starling Foundation Scholarship to the Aspen Music Festival and School.
With his ensemble The Kamila Quartet, Mr. Ferri has twice been invited to attend the Robert Mann String Quartet Institute at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. The Kamila Quartet was founded in 2016 under the auspices of Rice University, and this year the group made their debuts at Chamber Music Houston and Da Camera of Houston. The Kamilas will attend the Aspen Music Festival’s Center for Advanced Quartet Studies, and compete in the 45th Annual Fischoff Competition in the summer of 2018.
Mr. Ferri plays on a violin by Giuseppe Pedrazzini, Cremona, 1900 on generous loan from Florian Leonhard Fine Violins.