Winter Solstice Celebration 2024

Ian Maksin was born in Leningrad, former USSR, into a multinational family and grew up absorbing many cultures and traditions from an early age.  His diverse musical experience, including playing rock and blues guitar and passion for jazz and world music has allowed him to take the cello to a new dimension and develop his own distinct style as a musician and composer. In Ian's own words: "At some point I realized that music is much more than mere entertainment. Music is one of the most powerful and unifying forces in the world, capable of healing, inspiring, bringing people together and bringing peace among them. I believe that cello will save the world.”

Praised by the Chicago Classical Review for her “standout” and “joyful” playing, Emma Hospelhorn is a flutist whose creative practices resist easy categorization. As a member of Ensemble Dal Niente, she has recorded works by composers including George Lewis, Hilda Paredes, Erin Gee, Jeff Parker, Igor Santos, Anthony Cheung, and many more. She is one half of The Machine Is Neither…, an electroacoustic duo centered around motion-catpure technology, which has created works including Terra Lingua (2019/2020) for dancers in motion-capture suits and live instruments, and Tree of Secrets (2018) for audience and listening lamp. She performs with a wide variety of improvising ensembles, folk, and pop groups, and additional collaborations include a working duo for instruments and homemade circuits with cellist Katinka Kleijn, as well as stints with Manual Cinema, the Neo-Futurists, Lookingglass Theatre, and Silk Road Rising. She also writes and performs experimental folk music as Em Spel.

Since 2006 Mabel Kwan has lived in Chicago, where she sings vocals with the Lucky Bikes, plays piano with Fifth Season, and plays chamber music with Bridging Memory Through Music, a therapeutic intervention for patients with dementia. Mabel volunteers for TECHNE, an organization that works with young girls to build electronic instruments and improvise using music technology. 

Mabel's 2016 debut solo album, one poetic switch (Milk Factory Productions) features works written for her on piano and clavichord. In the same year she released a solo clavichord album, Inventions (Parlour Tapes+) in collaboration with composer Danny Clay and artist Andrew Barco. In 2018 Mabel released the premiere recording of the complete Trois Hommages (New Focus) by Georg Friedrich Haas. Mabel plays on Ensemble Dal Niente's albums Balter/Saunier (New Amsterdam) with rock band Deerhoof, and on the George Lewis portrait album Assemblage (New World).