Twenty-two-year-old cellist Lev Mamuya combines his passion for music with a keen interest in studying and celebrating what is most essential and affirming to society in a variety of cultural practices. Having completed a BA in History and Literature from Harvard focusing on 20th-century cultural studies, Mamuya is now completing his MM in cello performance from New England Conservatory; he completed his undergraduate performance studies with Paul Katz and now studies with Yeesun Kim. Previous teachers include Michael Reynolds, Laura Blustein, and Debbie Thompson. He also studied with Ronald Leonard at the Perlman Music Program on Shelter Island for seven summers.
An experienced soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, Mamuya gave his first solo recital at five and made his orchestral debut at age eight with the Cape Cod Symphony. As the Junior Division First Place Laureate of the 2013 Sphinx Competition, he appeared as a soloist with the Florida Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the South Bend Symphony, the Ann Arbor Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Brevard Concert Orchestra. More recently, Mamuya has been a member of groups like the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, participated in the chamber music programs at Harvard and NEC, and given concerts around the Boston area. He has attended the Banff Centre Masterclass program, and worked as a research intern at the Bach Archive and Research Facility in Leipzig.
Mamuya has also been committed to exploring meaningful performance settings for the 21stcentury. As a member of the Brattle Street Chamber Players, as well an intensive chamber music workshop at Harvard which gave concerts in Princeton and New York, he has sought to both explore his avid interest in chamber music and develop programming and production instincts that increase the authenticity, approachability, and emotive capability of the concert setting.
Outside of his performing efforts, Mamuya wears many hats. He is a composer, whose works have been performed at the Rockport Music Festival, the New England Conservatory, and at several venues around Boston, and who has received several commissions from Winsor Music in Boston, most recently a piece for oboe, violin, viola, and two cellos that functioned as a loose examination of Turing machines and other early modern computing technologies. He is an arts administrator, who proudly helped to curate his college literary magazine, the Advocate, serving as its publisher in 2017. And he is a poet, who has studied with Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Jorie Graham and attended the Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore. Mamuya also enjoys nonfiction writing, cooking, and making music that is anything but classical.
