by Mike Telin
On Thursday, June 25 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall at CIM, violinist/composer Michelle Barzel Ross will make her ChamberFest Cleveland debut with her own Birds on the Moon for String Quartet. The program, “Flights of Fancy,” will also include Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio in E-Flat and Reynaldo Hahn’s Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor. A prelude talk presented by Dr. Ira D. Sasowsky begins at 6:30 pm. Tickets are available online.
I reached Ross by phone and began our conversation by asking her how the invitation to Chamber Fest came about.
Michelle Barzel Ross: I have been friends with Roman and Diana for a long time. We were at Juilliard and the Marlboro Music Festival and I’ve always looked forward to one day being able to perform at this amazing festival. So I’m really thrilled to be having my first time at the festival as a performer and composer.
Mike Telin: Your String Quartet, Birds on the Moon, has been played a lot by the Juilliard Quartet.
MBR: Yes. I had the amazing opportunity to hear them play it in the States, and now that I’m based in Paris, I was able to hear them play it in Berlin and Vienna, which was kind of a once in a lifetime experience.
MT: You’ll be playing in that quartet for your first ChamberFest concert: what’s it like to perform your own music in an ensemble?
MBR: That’s a tricky question, because sometimes I don’t like to play my music. Part of the real joy of composing, and sometimes the pain of it, is letting go of your work and letting it exist without you.
I’ve had the honor of writing for incredible musicians, and the Juilliard String Quartet toured my piece for an entire year. Being able to witness it evolving in their hands and taking on a life of its own was very surreal. So to be perfectly honest, I’m a little nervous.
String quartets are the hardest medium for me to compose. My very first string quartet is emotionally difficult for me to perform. Like Birds on the Moon, it was commissioned in memory of Roger Tapping, who was an extremely dear mentor and friend and teacher of mine. I wrote that piece right after he passed away, so it was very much part of my grieving process.
And Birds on the Moon is completely my love letter to Roger. I wrote it a year or two after he passed, so I had a little more distance. I don’t know, but I’m sure playing it will be really intense.
MT: What are your thoughts about the other pieces you’ll be performing?
MBR: Actually, everything on the program, except for Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, is a new piece for me, including my own. So it’s going to be an amazing week of exploring music with artists I have admired for so long — I’m really excited to dive in.
MT: You’ve worked with many interesting people including Avi Avital and Jon Batiste.
MBR: Both of them have such unique musical visions. And I got a call from a friend who plays in Avi’s Between Worlds Ensemble and I was able to be a guest playing with them a few years ago. I felt like I’d waited my whole life to play that kind of music, but didn’t know it until I was there, so that was magical.
Jon and I went to Juilliard together, so we’re longtime friends. And when we were young kids running around school, I used to hear him and his band all the time at Dizzy’s and we would talk about music and share recordings.
When I started improvising, I would always send Jon recordings and get advice from him. And then he invited me to the studio and I got to work on his incredible album — WE ARE.
MT: When did you start composing?
MBR: When I was about thirteen, and at that age it was an extremely natural thing for me. At that young, naive state, I remember writing those first few pieces and they just kind of fell out of me.
As I got older I got really serious about the violin, and I was also studying literature, so I got busy and took a break from composing. And when I started exclusively improvising, I had difficulty finding my way to the page and the notated score, and being a composer with a capital C.
Now I’m in an amazing place where I’ve seriously spent time understanding improvisation as a medium and how it informs my composing and my violin playing.
MT: I’m always intrigued by people who aren’t afraid to improvise. How did you begin?
MBR: Improvisation found me. When I first started it was like an explosion of my artistic voice coming through an instrument that wasn’t my own. Because I started improvising on the piano it felt like this sacred space where I had no expectations. It was just this physical reaction to how I was feeling.
As I started recording my improvisations, I began listening and heard threads of musical ideas working themselves out — I am a real believer that our intuition is extremely wise. And when I improvise, it allows me to access my musical soul without thinking in a conscious manner.
In Bach’s time everyone was improvising. And I love to think that this is how music was. And after many years I started feeling more comfortable improvising in and around Bach. And now when I compose, sometimes I improvise. I always play Bach on the piano every morning, and sometimes I improvise from the end of whatever I was playing.
MT: Final question. I’ve always admired people who earn double degrees: Why did you decide to get an English lit degree at Columbia along with the Juilliard schooling?
MBR: I love poetry, and I love literature, and actually, I kind of fought my instinct to get an English degree because I thought I should use this chance to study other things. But in the end, I just had to follow my big passion, and I’m so happy that I had those years at Columbia.
And in my composing now it’s so integral to how I see music and how I see art. A lot of my scores have written in little fragments of poetry. The structure of Birds on the Moon is almost a poetic structure, and a lot of my pieces have now taken on that life because I’m gaining more familiarity with my own obsessions and curiosity.
So it’s really common for me to be composing and then this theme that I’ve been carrying around for a long time reminds me of a phrase by Wallace Stevens. Then all of a sudden this beautiful labyrinth appears almost by my unconscious design. So having the chance to study literature when I was in college was really formative and beautiful.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com June 17, 2026
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