B i o g r a p h y

Spinning “long lines of beauty and strength” (Buffalo News) with a "big, generous tone," (Boston Globe) American cellist Natasha Farny is a dedicated and passionate performer. She can be heard on several professional recordings, including “French Cello Music” for cello and piano with Jitka Fowler Frankova, released on the Centaur label in 2020. With pianist Eliran Avni of the Ekstasis Duo, she released two more albums: “Women’s Voices,” in 2022 and “…From the Shadows” in 2024. Ms. Farny has performed in national venues like Arizona's Del E. Webb Center, New York City's Merkin Hall and Bargemusic, and Colorado's Strings Music Festival. In 2022-2023, her duo premiered Avner Dorman's new Double Concerto for Cello, Piano, and Orchestra. She has performed live for WFMT and the Dame Myra Hess series in Chicago, the “Live at Hochstein” radio series on WXXI in Rochester, and Fred Childs’s Performance Today.  

 

Research interests include music by women for cello. She has presented her work online at several American and South American universities, and internationally at the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini in 2020. She published her paper, “Worthy of the Canon: Romantic Cello Sonatas by Women,” in the College Music Society Symposium in 2021. She will return to Italy to present a new paper on female composers in November 2024.

 

Ms. Farny made her concerto debut at age 17 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and Yale College during her undergraduate years. After completing her master’s and doctoral degrees at the Eastman School of Music and at the Juilliard School, she received a fellowship for study in Leipzig, Germany.

 

While studying at Juilliard, Ms. Farny performed two concertos, Dutilleux’s Tout un Monde Lointain with conductor Robert Spano and Olav Anton Thommessen’s world premiere, Through Reflection with conductor Joel Sachs. More recent performances have included concertos with the Buffalo Philharmonic, Abilene Philharmonic, and the Greeley Symphony Orchestra, as well as with the Longwood (Boston) Symphony, Orchard Park (NY) Symphony, National Music Festival Orchestra, Pennsylvania Sinfonia, Schenectady Symphony, Erie Chamber Orchestra, and the Western New York Chamber Orchestra. In summer 2024, she performed Saint-Saëns’s Concerto No. 1 with JoAnn Falletta at the Sewanee Music Center. She has toured Brazil, the Czech Republic, and Germany, and performed the music of Varèse on the Cello Theremin in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York City.

 

Ms. Farny is Professor of Cello at the School of Music at the State University of New York in Fredonia. She has been honored there with several promotions and awards, including grants from the Faculty Student Association and the United University Professions, as well as the Hagan Young Scholar Artist Award and the Kasling Memorial Lecture Award. In the summer, she teaches at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival and the Fredonia String Camp and has been appointed to festivals in Chestertown, MD, Boulder, CO, Anchorage, AK, and Sweden, ME.