News Release
The Cleveland Orchestra appoints violinist
CLEVELAND, July 30, 2010 – Music Director Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra today announced the appointment of Elayna Duitman to the second violin section of the Orchestra. She will join The Cleveland Orchestra during the 2010 Blossom Festival season on August 2.
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Violinist Elayna Duitman (pronounced DITE-mun) served as a member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2002 to 2010. She was born in Bradenton, Florida, into a musical family. Ms. Duitman is a 1998 graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston. Upon graduation with honors in both academics and violin performance, she received a Netherland-America Foundation Grant from the Fulbright Foundation and a Frank H. Beebe Grant for study abroad. She then spent two years studying at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, the Netherlands, where she received her master’s degree in 2000.
Also in 2000, Ms. Duitman won her first orchestral position, as a first violinist in the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra in Amsterdam, where she spent one season performing in the Concertgebouw and touring extensively throughout the Netherlands, Germany, and Hong Kong. She also played in the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. In 2001, she and her husband, Dutch musician Zeger Verhage, moved from the Netherlands to Phoenix, where she served as associate concertmaster of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra for the 2001-02 season. The couple moved to Detroit in 2002, when Ms. Duitman joined the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Duitman has participated in numerous music festivals, including the Interlochen Festival of the Arts, Encore School for Strings, Sarasota Music Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra in Germany, and the Academy of XXth Century Music with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. Her teachers have included James Buswell, Vera Beths, Allen Ohmes, David Updegraff, and Linda Cerone. Ms. Duitman and her husband have two sons, David and Lukas.
Press Contact: Jennifer Schlosser, (216) 231-7518, jschlosser@clevelandorchestra.com
