Derek Bermel was featured as a composer and performer at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Allan Kozann, writing for the Portland Press Herald, “Bermel is one of Bowdoin’s success stories. Now a faculty member, he attended the festival as a student 22 years ago…[As a] clarinetist Bermel held the spotlight in Leonard Bernstein’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano [and] gave it a vital, persuasive performance…
“His Clarinet Quintet was inspired by the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, and the piece, with its bent clarinet pitches and sliding string figures, seems to offer a handful of inventive musical depictions of gravity at work…It also draws on Bermel’s passion for weaving elements from other cultures into Western forms. At times, the clarinet writing took on characteristics of Asian or Middle Eastern music; elsewhere, its oscillating string lines and kaleidoscopic clarinet figures gave it an otherworldly quality, free of connections to time or place, and entirely Bermel’s own.”
Read Kozann’s complete review here.