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Claude Kenneson has long enjoyed an international career as a chamber music artist and is the co-founder of two distinguished Canadian ensembles, the Corydon String Trio and the University of Alberta String Quartet. European critics have described his cello recitals as “a glimpse of the superb…unusually brilliant, triumphant cello playing!” In London’s Wigmore Hall where he has introduced many new works by Canadian composers, his persuasive musicianship is held in the highest esteem by audiences and critics alike. A frequent performer on the radio and television networks of both the Canadian and British Broadcasting Corporations, he has appeared before hundreds of audiences from the west coast of Canada to the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel and at the prestigious Festivals in Cheltenham, Purbeck, and Banff in chamber music concerts with such artists as Evelyn Barbirolli (oboe), Zoltán Szekély and Sidney Harth (violin), Antonia Lavanne and Maureen Forrester (voice), and William Primrose (viola). With cellist Leonard Rose he has been seen frequently on PBS in the award-winning television film Violoncello produced by Nebraska Educational Television.
For forty years Claude Kenneson has been an acknowledged writer. After reading Kenneson’s earliest pedagogical writings, Pablo Casals described him as “Remarkable in interpreting my ideas, my credo in music…profound understanding.” His pedagogical works appear in leading journals such as The Strad, American String Teacher, CSTA Notes, Canadian Music Educator, The Instrumentalist, and Chamber Music Quarterly. His book, A Bibliography of Cello Ensemble Music, appears as No. 31 in the series Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography while another book, A Cellist’s Guide to the New Approach,, has become a standard reference work. For Amadeus Press he has written Székely and Bartók: The Story of a Friendship and Musical Prodigies: Perilous Journeys, Remarkable Lives.
A graduate of the University of Texas in 1959, he studied the cello with the Belgian master Horace Britt, then later with Pablo Casals and Pierre Fournier. He began transcribing a broad spectrum of music over fifty years ago, and while Music Director of Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, then later of London’s Western Theatre Ballet, he orchestrated the then-current repertoire of these two ballet companies before joining the University of Alberta staff in 1965 to teach cello and music theory.
For six distinguished cello ensembles, The Yale Cellos, The Banff Cellos, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Cello Ensemble, The Birmingham Cello Group, The Cello Ensemble of the Sydney (Australia) Conservatorium, and the University of Texas Cello Choir, he has composed original works or transcribed the music of others, including twenty-three composers ranging from Isaac Albeniz to Antonio Vivaldi. Many of these works have been recorded by CBC, Calliope, and Naxos. In 2006, at the invitation of Yale University, he made a gift of over seventy of his original compositions and transcriptions for cello and cello ensemble; this collection now forms the “Claude Kenneson Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale Univerisity.”
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