About Me
Gregor Kitzis plays regularly with The Orchestra of St. Lukes at Carnegie Hall, is the concertmaster and contractor of Orchestra of Our Time, the first violinist of the Scorchio Electric String Quartet and is a founding member of The Ouluska Pass Chamber Music Festival in Saranac Lake, N.Y. He has performed Baroque music at Blanche Moyse's New England Bach Festival and on period instruments with The Grand Tour Orchestra, orchestral music with with Concordia, Long Island Philharmonic and the Roanoke Symphony, premiered and recorded countless new works with emsembles including Speculum Musicae, The Group For Contemporary Music, Bang On A Can's Spit Orchestra, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Albany Symphony, Ensemble 21, North/South Consonance, Essential Music and the Crosstown, Xenakis and S.E.M Ensembles. He also writes, records and performs original music with bands including Voltaire, Labor Force, Songs From a Random House, Gawk and Church of Betty. He has written music and recorded for David Bowie, been the string contractor for TV appearances with Enya and performed with artist ranging from Anthony Braxton, Elliot Sharp and Don Byron to John Cage, Morton Feldman, Elliot Carter and George Crumb playing everything from solo and chamber music recitals and Broadway Shows to rock, ragtime, Klezmer, Indian and Tango in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the late CBGB's, The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, Saturday Night Live, the David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Rosie O'Donnel and Jay Leno Shows, and new music and jazz festivals throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.Recent highlights include chamber music performances with National Musical Arts (membership consists mostly of principal players of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.) and recitals of Holocaust composers in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles presented by the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He also owns an inspiring collection of old French bows featuring examples by Tourte, Peccatte and Voirin and plays an old, Italian violin made in 1700 by Giovanni Grancino.Of his performance of Nils Vigeland's "Ives Music", The New York Times called it, "scratchier and more mistuned than even Ives would have found amusing."More recently, they wrote, "The important violin solos were excellently projected by Gregor Kitzis, sometimes with whistling purity, always with vivid presence." - Paul Griffiths, New York Times, 11/22/00.
