Keiran Campbell & Sezi Seskir
Biography Keiran Campbell & Sezi Seskir
Keiran Campbell
was drawn to the cello after he stumbled across one in his grandmother’s basement and was baffled by its size. Once he turned 8, he began taking lessons—on a much smaller cello—in his native Greensboro, North Carolina. After studying extensively with Leonid Zilper, former solo cellist of the Bolshoi Ballet, he received his Bachelors and Masters at the Juilliard School, working with Darrett Adkins, Timothy Eddy, and Phoebe Carrai. Keiran also spent several springs in Cornwall, England, studying with Steven Isserlis and Ralph Kirshbaum at Prussia Cove. Keiran has performed with ensembles including The English Concert, NYBI, Philharmonia Baroque, The Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Four Nations Ensemble, and Les Violons du Roy. He recently performed with Le Concert Des Nations under Jordi Savall, touring Europe performing Beethoven Symphonies before recording them on Savall’s new Beethoven CD. During the summers, Keiran has performed with Teatro Nuovo, Lakes Area Music Festival, and The Carmel Bach Festival. He is also on faculty at the recently formed, UC Berkeley-based, Chamber Music Collective, which focuses primarily on post-1750 performance practice. Recent performance highlights include concerto appearances with Tafelmusik and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a concert of Monteverdi Madrigals with Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations in Carnegie Hall, a solo recital with fortepianist Sezi Seskir at the Berkeley Early Music festival, and performances of Handel’s Saul and Solomon with English Concert at the BBC Proms and Edinburgh Festival. Keiran is also fascinated by instrument making, which he studies with the maker of his cello, Timothy Johnson.
Sezi Seskir
received her first degree in piano in Ankara, Turkey, with Prof. Kamuran Gündemir. She went on with her studies at the Lübeck Musikhochschule, in Germany, with Prof. Konstanze Eickhorst, where in 2005 she completed degrees in both artistic and pedagogical piano. Along with many solo recitals in Europe, the USA and Turkey, she also performed with various orchestras as a soloist, playing Schumann's A-minor piano concerto Op. 54, Ravel's Concerto in G-major and Mozart's A-major, K. 414 piano concerto.
Seskir’s musical direction took a new turn after completing her D.M.A. degree in performance practice with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University. Her experience performing on a variety of historical keyboards, including 5-octave instruments from the second half of the 18th century, as well as 6 and 6.5-octave instruments from the first half of the 19th century, enriched and deepened her understanding of the genres and repertoire of these periods. Her research focuses on the use of tempo rubato in Robert Schumann's keyboard music, as well as performance practices of the 18th and the 19th centuries. She has given guest lecture-recitals and workshops at schools such as Stanford University, Penn State University, Princeton University, Trinity College of London, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and UC Berkeley. She presented her work on Schumann at King's College London, the American Musicological Society’s meetings, the Schumann-Haus in Zwickau, Germany, and the Basel Musikhochschule in Switzerland. These last two presentations resulted in two articles, both of which appeared by Studio Punkt Verlag, in Germany and in Basel, Switzerland, respectively. Her editions of Robert Schumann's piano works Arabeske Op. 18 and Blumenstück Op.19 for the Schumann Complete Edition published by Schott and Bärenreiter, appeared in 2016 and 2021. Seskir co-edited a collection of essays on interpretation titled ‘Topics in Musical Interpretation’, which appeared by Routledge in 2023.
Sezi Seskir is an associate professor of music at Bucknell University. She regularly performs with her chamber music partners violinist Lucy Russell and cellist Keiran Campbell. Seskir and Russell released a CD of Beethoven’s violin sonatas on period instruments in 2020 by Acis Label. She is the co-founder of Chamber Music Collective, an intense chamber music program on period instruments.
