arts&life
music

Abraham Feder

Welcome
To Detroit

Cellist Abraham Feder joins the DSO.

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A

braham Feder is making a
sound name for himself play-
ing cello as part of celebrated
orchestras — the Sarasota Orchestra,
Dallas Symphony Orchestra and now
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO)
beginning with the 2018-2019 season.
Instrumentalist Feder is getting
attention locally since being named
assistant principal cello (Dorothy and
Herbert Graebner Chair) by the DSO
and is excited about working with the
orchestra, being in a beautiful hall with

heralded acoustics and moving into
a city whose turnaround has gained
national notice.
“It’s always an honor to work with
the music director who does the hir-
ing so I’m really happy that Maestro
Leonard Slatkin will be doing some
conducting,” says Feder, who had to
compete with other cellists during a
series of blind auditions and a trial
weeks before being accepted.
Slatkin, who retired as DSO music
director last season, is returning as

music director laureate to open the
classical programming on Oct. 5 with a
weekend of Orchestra Hall performanc-
es featuring violinist Gil Shaham.
Slatkin will return twice more during
the season, leading the DSO’s three-
week American Festival in February
and closing the season in June with pia-
nist Makoto Ozone, the featured soloist
on the DSO’s tour of Japan last summer.
“The orchestra is going through a
music director search so we have some
exciting guest conductors coming in,”
Feder continues. “One concert in par-
ticular that will be really special for me
is the Beethoven Symphony No. 5 con-
cert with Carlos Miguel Prieto.
“I worked with him at the Orchestra
of the Americas almost 10 years ago,
where I actually wound up winning a
cello competition, so it will be fun to
work with him again.
“It’s always wonderful to work with the
big-name soloists like violinist Christian
Tetzlaff and pianist Emanuel Ax as well
as the artists I’ve never had a chance to
work with before. It will be really amaz-
ing for those concerts as well.”
Among this season’s guest artists will
be conductors Kent Nagano, Ludovic
Morlot and Simone Young as well as
instrumentalists Kirill Gerstein (pia-
nist), Pekka Kuusisto (violinist) and Avi
Avital (mandolinist).
Feder, 32, has been drawn to the cello
since before turning 3. Although forbid-
den to touch his older brother’s cello, he
wasn’t forbidden to touch the bow and
improvised by pairing it with his dad’s
guitar substituting for the cello.
“Playing the cello came from being
stubborn and competitive,” says Feder,
whose parents introduced him to the
Suzuki method of study shortly after
he turned 3. “I was in the Chicago
Youth Symphony Orchestra starting at
age 9 and was in it until I graduated
high school.
“I went to the Curtis Institute of
Music in Philadelphia and got my job
in Sarasota just before I graduated
Curtis. I was in Sarasota for six years
until 2014, when I went back to school,
the Shepherd School of Music at Rice
University in Houston, and got my mas-
ter’s degree. Just before graduation, I got
hired by the Dallas Symphony and was
there until the end of this past season.”
Feder, the only one of three brothers
to become a professional musician,
traces his Jewish commitments to his

early years growing up in Chicago.
“When I was very young, my parents
bought a condo right across the street
from Temple Sholom, and I went to
Sunday school, had a bar mitzvah and
played Kol Nidre every year.
“While I was working for the Sarasota
Orchestra, I went to Poland to play in
the Festival of Jewish Culture and per-
formed in the Nozyk Synagogue, the
last surviving ghetto synagogue.
“That was a really memorable expe-
rience in that kind of a setting. While I
was there, the piano trio I was playing
with made a trip to Auschwitz, and that
was an experience I will never forget.”
Feder’s wife, harpist Cheryl Losey
Feder, was introduced to a segment
of the Metro Detroit Jewish commu-
nity as she played at the Birmingham
Temple during High Holiday services.
This past summer, she performed in
Israel with the Philadelphia Orchestra
as they appeared in Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Jerusalem.
The past summer brought a new
experience for the cellist, who has
made a Strauss recording with the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Feder, comfortable with chamber
music appearances often with the
Chroma Quartet, was assistant princi-
pal cellist with the Santa Fe Opera.
“It was a compact season because
we did five operas in 10 weeks,” Feder
explains. “I’d played opera as a one-off
in Sarasota and school, but in the Santa
Fe rehearsal schedule, sometimes we’d
play five operas in 2½ days. To change
gears so quickly was challenging, and I
learned to have a lot of respect for opera
orchestras in a way I wasn’t expecting.”
As the new season begins with
the DSO, the Feders will have a new
personal experience — longer times
living apart. Although she has been
named principal harpist in the Buffalo
Philharmonic Orchestra, they are tak-
ing an upbeat attitude about the chang-
ing distance between them by thinking
of the assignments as bringing them
closer to other relatives.
“Both of our families live in the
North, mine in Chicago and hers
in Maine,” says Feder, whose father,
Michael Feder, is a University of
Michigan alum guiding his son to
become a Michigan sports fan. “Our
new posts will bring us closer to these
relatives after being in Dallas, which
was a huge trek.” ■

details Scheduling and ticket information on the 2018-2019 Detroit Symphony Orchestra season is available by visiting dso.org.

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October 4 • 2018

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