Eliot Bailen

Eliot Bailen has an active career as an artistic director, cellist, composer and teacher. Strings Magazine writes, “At Merkin Hall ‘cellist Eliot Bailen displayed a warm focused tone, concentrated expressiveness and admirable technical command always at the service of the music.” Founder and Artistic Director of the Sherman Chamber Ensemble, now in its 35th year, whose performances the New York Times has described as “the Platonic ideal of a chamber music concert,” Mr. Bailen is also Founder and Artistic Director of Chamber Music at Rodeph Sholom in New York and has recently been appointed Artistic Director of the New York Chamber Ensemble. Principal cello of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, New York Chamber Ensemble, Orchestra New England, New York Bach Artists, Teatro Grattacielo and the New Choral Society, Mr. Bailen also performs regularly with the Saratoga Chamber Players, Cape May Music Festival, Sebago-Long Lake Chamber Music Festival as well as with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York City Opera and Ballet, American Symphony, Stamford Symphony and New Jersey Symphony. Heard frequently in numerous Broadway shows, in 2015 he was solo cellist for ‘Allegiance.’ As a composer, Mr. Bailen’s commissions include an Octet (“For Ellen”) for 3 winds and strings (2013), a Double Concerto for Flute and Cello (2012) commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and Perhaps a Butterfly (2011), for Soprano, child soprano, flute and string trio. His Saratoga Sextet, commissioned by the Saratoga Chamber Players, premiered in June, 2014 (“The crowd loved it!” writes the Schenectady Daily Gazette). Recently Mr. Bailen’s musical, The Tiny Mustache, received a third grant for further development from the Omer Foundation after its successful debut. Mr. Bailen has received over thirty commissions for his “Song to Symphony” project, an extended school residency program that presents children’s original musicals in an orchestral setting (subject of a NY Times feature article Sept. 2006). This project was recently awarded a special Alumni Grant from the Yale School of Music. In 2002 he received the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking. Most recently, Mr. Bailen inaugurated SCP’s “Classroom to Concert” project at Lake Avenue Elementary school with an encore presentation at SPAC as part of Radial Arts’ Poetry in the Pines.  Mr. Bailen received his Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) from Yale University and an M.B.A. from NYU. He is on the cello and chamber music faculty at Columbia University and Teachers College.