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 w
ork…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.