Kenneth Slowik, Cello and Viol
Kenneth Slowik first established his international reputation primarily as a cellist and viola da gamba player through his work with the Castle Trio, Axelrod Quartet, and with Anner Bylsma’s L’Archibudelli. He has been a featured instrumental soloist and/or conductor with numerous orchestras, among them the National Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, the Vancouver Symphony, the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, Sinfonia Iuventus, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Santa Fe Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, which he led from 1999-2004. A frequent guest artist with prominent chamber groups as well as with many of the leading U.S. early music ensembles, he enjoys providing the organ or harpsichord continuo for performances of large-scale baroque works at various festivals in the United States and abroad, and appears in recital both as harpsichord soloist and fortepiano collaborator for duo sonatas and Lieder.
Slowik’s impressive discography comprises over sixty recordings featuring him as conductor, cellist, gambist, barytonist and keyboard player for music ranging from the Baroque (Marais, Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach) through the Classical (Haydn, Boccherini, Beethoven, Schubert) and Romantic (Mendelssohn, Gade, Spohr, Brahms) to the early twentieth century (Schöenberg, Mahler, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss). Of these, many have won prestigious international awards, including France’s Diapason d’Or and Choc, the “British Music Retailers’ Award for Excellence,” Italy’s Premio Internazionale del Disco Antonio Vivaldi, two GRAMMY® nominations, and numerous “Record of the Month” and “Record of the Year” prizes.
As an educator, Dr. Slowik has presented lectures at colleges, universities, and museums throughout the United States and in Europe and the UK. A member of the University of Maryland faculty, he taught at L’Académie Internationale du Domaine Forget in Québec for nearly twenty years, and has been Artistic Director of the Baroque Performance Institute at the Oberlin College Conservatory since 1993. He is the 2025 recipient of EMA’s Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music.