Strings Attached Highly Regarded Cellist Will Join Zephyr For Show At The Met

When Darrett Adkins announced to his cello teacher his intention to become a professional cellist, you could have knocked her over with a grace note. More than a decade later, Adkins recalls her surprised reply, “Oh, my, we have a lot of work to do.”

And, indeed, the work got done.

Adkins now teaches at the Juilliard School in New York and is a frequent performer both as soloist and in chamber music. He will join Spokane pianist Kendall Feeney for Zephyr’s “Post-Polka” concert Friday at The Met. They will perform Bohuslav Martinu’s Variations on a Slovak Folksong and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata No. 1.

“I grew up in Tacoma,” Adkins says, “and my first serious teacher on the cello was Cordelia Wikarski-Miedel. I was a soccer player and a serious student in academic subjects, but a little bit lazy in my work on the cello.

“My cello playing really started coming together in my senior year of high school. The summer before, I’d attended Encore School for Strings, a summer program run by the Cleveland Institute of Music.

“The world of cello playing was blown open for me there,” Adkins says. “I heard a lot of string players, and I started practicing scales, started practicing more than an hour a day, things like that. I was one of the least-experienced students there, I had all this knowledge and enthusiasm, but I didn’t play the cello all that well. I was an underdog there.”

This summer Adkins has been invited to return to the Encore School, this time as a faculty member.

After the hard work he put in on the cello as a high school senior, Adkins left Tacoma for the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio, then to the Rice Institute in Houston for a master’s degree. He is now in the doctoral program at Juilliard where he is a teaching associate working with Juilliard Quartet cellist Joel Krosnik.

“I’ve always been interested in contemporary music,” Adkins says. “The only concerts I attended consistently when I was growing up was the Kronos Quartet series in Seattle in their early days there. And I played in contemporary music groups at Oberlin, Rice, and at Tanglewood and Aspen.”

Adkins met Zephyr’s artistic director Kendall Feeney while visiting his mother and stepfather in Spokane. “My stepfather had introduced me to Verne Windham at KPBX,” the cellist says. “While I was sitting there, Verne called Kendall, and before I knew it, I was in Kendall’s living room and we were playing the Shostakovich Sonata.

“We had a great time, it was like we’d always played together,” Adkins says. “After about 10 minutes, Kendall said, ‘Great! How’d you like to play on Zephyr?’ I thought she must be kidding.”

She wasn’t.

Feeney says, “What I liked about Darrett’s playing was the fun he seemed to be having at the same time he was preserving the integrity of the music. He had the kind of energy and intensity I like to have in the people who play on Zephyr.”

Adkins appeared on the Zephyr series last season and returns Friday to perform the work he and Feeney first tried out together, the Shostakovich Cello Sonata. “It’s a great work; it has that endless melody in the first movement, this wandering Russian folk melody with a great amount of tenderness, but nothing predictable about it, and that angry and brilliant scherzo which some people liken to a machine gun.

“The last movement is 100 percent ironic. It sounds good-natured, moving from one fun thing to another, but it’s not. There’s a real darkness underpinning it all,” Adkins says.

Adkins and Feeney will also perform Martinu’s Variations on a Slovak Folksong. “I’d always avoided Martinu’s music because I thought it was a little slick, flashy but lacking real substance,” Adkins says.”But these variations are very, very colorful and very characterful, the least-know of Martinu’s cello works but the very best.”

Joining Adkins and Feeney Friday are Spokane musicians soprano Darnelle Preston, clarinetist Anthony Taylor, harpist Camille Peterson and pianist Greg Presley. Their all-Slavic program will include Igor Stravinsky’s “Circus Polka” for two pianos, Ervin Schulhoff’s song cycle, “Songs and Dances from the Tesin Region,” and Zbynek Mateju’s “Stele of Forbiddance” for clarinet and harp.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Zephyr will present a “Post-Polka” concert featuring pianist Kendall Feeney and cellist Darrett Adkins Friday at 8 p.m. at The Met. Tickets are $12 and $15, $8 for students, available through G&B.