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 celebrating its 40th 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 Artistic Director of the New York Chamber Ensemble.
Principal cello of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, New York Chamber Ensemble, Orchestra New England, Teatro Grattacielo and the New Choral Society (The Michael B. Packer Chair), Mr. Bailen 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, Oratorio Society, American Symphony, Stamford Symphony, New Jersey Symphony and is heard frequently in numerous Broadway shows.
Among Mr. Bailen’s commissions are an Octet, a Double Concerto for Flute and Cello, Perhaps a Butterfly, Saratoga Sextet The Tiny Mustache (a musical) and recently a Dectet (“Inclusion”) commissioned by the New Choral Society.
Mr. Bailen is recipient of over forty commissions for his "Song to Symphony" for schools (subject of a NY Times feature article Sept. 2006 and winner of a Yale Alumni Grant).
In 2002 he received the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking.
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.