About

About Malina

Soprano, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and teacher.

Biography

A life across voice, strings, and stage

Malina Rauschenfels is a soprano, composer, and multi-instrumentalist transplanted to Cleveland after 11 years in New York City. Praised by the New York Times for her “compelling” performances and as “remarkable” by the Village Voice, she has also been commended by Cleveland Classical for her “exceptional vocal range, strong acting abilities, gripping theatricality, and commanding gestures, both musical and physical.” She is co-founder and executive director of Burning River Baroque and artistic director of hūmAnómali, ensembles that weave dance, gesture, and theatricality into historically informed performance.

She holds a BM from the Eastman School of Music (cello performance and composition, with a Spanish minor from the University of Rochester) and an MM from The Juilliard School in cello performance. There she discovered dance and its lasting influence on gesture and theatricality in her compositions and performances.

Currently Malina performs as a soprano, cellist, and occasionally violinist and treble gambist, accepts commissions, and teaches private lessons online and in Cleveland Heights. She is proud to be a Barcelona Festival of Song Ambassador sharing Latin American and Iberian repertoire.

Further information is available at her group’s website: Burning River Baroque on Facebook · burning-river-baroque.org

Role

Soprano

Praised by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “spellbinding” and for her “powerful clarion tones and crisp articulation,” Malina sings with Burning River Baroque (as co-founder and executive director) and leads hūmAnómali, a collaboratively structured ensemble that incorporates dance, gesture, and theatricality into historically informed performances from antiquity to the present.

Equally comfortable with early music and contemporary music, she has sung with Quire Cleveland, Contrapunctus, Marble Sanctuary Choir, Toby Twining Music, Trinity Chamber Singers, Trinity Cathedral Choir, and C4 – the Choral Composer Conductor Collective. As a vocalist she has attended multiple years of Western Wind Workshops and the Ensemble Singing Intensive workshops at Amherst Early Music.

She has appeared in broadcast performances on WCLV Cleveland and can be heard on “Musica Celestial” with the Newberry Consort, “Caritas et Amor” with Marble Sanctuary Choir, and recordings with Quire Cleveland. Selected recent engagements include “Celestial Sirens” with The Newberry Consort, SoHIP early music series concerts in Boston with Burning River Baroque, Cavalli’s Apollo e Dafne with Venice Opera Project, BEMF fringe programs, and Acis and Galatea with El Fuego.

Voice media

Malina Rauschenfels performing as soprano

Role

Cellist

Malina began the cello when she was five years old, but it did not present itself to her as a career option until she was almost sixteen. She attended Eastman School of Music where she studied with Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott and received a Bachelor of Music, double majoring in cello performance and composition. She was a board member and section leader in Nuove Musiche, a student-run ensemble dedicated to the performance of classical works in a historically informed manner. She was also a member of Tarab Cello Octet, where she performed many premieres plus standard literature, and Musica Nova and Ossia, contemporary music groups at Eastman.

From there she went on to The Juilliard School where she received a Master’s in cello performance and studied with Fred Sherry and Harvey Shapiro. She was a member of New Juilliard Ensemble, touring to perform in France for a new music festival. She also performed Davidovsky’s Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra with the Juilliard Orchestra under Reinbert de Leeuw. She has performed in Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, and with new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, including a piece for cellist with two bows by Kurtág. She has attended Bowdoin Summer Music Festival several times, participated in Manchester Music Festival, and been a guest artist/performer at Arts on the Edge Wolfeboro. She has worked with and premiered pieces by numerous living composers. She is a founding member of Burning River Baroque and curates performances combining cello, singing, early music, and new music.

Solo cello CD “In D”Cello media

Malina Rauschenfels with cello — Photo by Alisha Bausone

Role

Composer

Although Malina has always actively improvised, she did not begin to approach the art of writing it down until auditioning for the Perpich Center for Arts Education Arts High School. After high school, she continued studying composition at the Eastman School of Music while pursuing a composition and cello performance major. Her teachers included David Liptak, Augusta Read Thomas, and Sydney Hodkinson. During her four years at Eastman, nearly 20 of her pieces were premiered.

Following undergrad work, Malina attended The Juilliard School where she began working and collaborating with dancers and choreographers. She has had pieces premiered at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Juilliard Theater, and MASS MoCA, and composed for Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects, airelise, Doorknob Dance Company, Laura Flowers, and Dodge Dance Company, among others. Malina scored the dance film LineAge, which has played at numerous film festivals around the world, and received multiple premieres by new music choir C4. She has been commissioned to write for In Extensio, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Janus Trio, Rebecca Danard, and many others. In 2008 she was a Bang on a Can Composition Fellow where she had the opportunity to premiere her own work as well as perform the new works of others. She has curated, produced, and performed in four full-length concerts in New York City, promoting live music of her own and others in collaboration with dancers and choreographers.

Commissions: Malina specializes in writing pieces for unique individuals and groups, making each performer’s personal strengths, desires, and eccentricities an integral part of the piece. She enjoys the collaborative process and depends on the ideas of others to challenge and inspire her.

Composer media

Role

Dancer

Malina is entranced by how sounds and music of wildly differing styles make her body want to move, and how those movements in turn change how she feels inside. Particularly captivating to her is how facial expressions, contortions, inversion, and comedy can influence feelings even further. Thus, to her, dance is not so much about how it looks or what it means, but rather about the feelings that it inspires within, whether achieved vicariously or by personally moving. She has had dance training in ballet, Limón, release-influenced modern, and tumbling with a smattering of other circus-related arts. Malina choreographed and danced for multiple City Center studio performances, Zenon Summer Dance Intensives, and worked under Jody Oberfelder in Serbia and Montenegro. She loves working with dancers and choreographers and incorporating movement and gesture into pieces that she writes and performs.

Malina loves working on anything combining her love of dance, strings, singing, early music, and new music with choreographer/dancer and composer/performer friends where she seeks to weaken the boundaries that have grown to separate the arts into their disparate areas.

Dance photos by Scott Pakudaitis; silk photos from video stills

Studio

Study with Malina

Online private lessons for cello, violin, viola, flute, and piano.

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