Hailed by the New York Times as a clarinetist that plays with “vitality and nuance”, Liam Burke has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Mostly Mozart Festival, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orchestra Moderne NYC, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Stamford Symphony Orchestra among others. Burke has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Broadway Records, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., PBS, and Netflix. He has performed hundreds of times on Broadway in productions such as Les Misérables, The King and I, On the Town, Dr. Zhivago, The Cherry Orchard, Sunset Boulevard, and My Fair Lady.
Burke studied at The Juilliard School, where he earned admission into the Accelerated BM/MM Degree Program. Juilliard awarded Burke the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music. He won Juilliard’s Clarinet Concerto Competition and led the conductor-less Juilliard Chamber Orchestra in Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.
Burke has been a member of Ensemble ACJW (now known as Ensemble Connect), “a two-year fellowship program for the finest young professional classical musicians in the United States that prepares them for careers that combine musical excellence with teaching, community engagement, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership.” He has completed three residencies as a chamber musician and teacher at Skidmore College. In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe wrote about Burke during Juilliard’s ChamberFest: “Even as memories of large swaths of the evening gradually fade, it will be hard to forget Liam Burke’s handling of the great clarinet solo in “Abyss of the Birds,” the third section of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”: the long, slow crescendos building inexorably from velvety quiet to stark pierces that filled Paul Recital Hall.”
