Zachary Carrettin

Zachary Carrettín is an exceptionally versatile musician, active as a conductor and as a player of both modern stringed instruments and historical instruments such as the cello da spalla. He is the music director of the Boulder Bach Festival. Carrettín was born on December 1, 1972, and grew up in Houston, Texas. He attended Rice University, majoring in violin performance and studying with Kenneth Goldsmith and Sergiu Luca. Carrettín went on to the University of Illinois, where he switched to conducting and studied with Donald Schleicher. He undertook further studies at the National University of Music in Bucharest, Romania, with Dumitru Goia, earning a Professional Studies Certificate there, and he took master classes and festival classes from Michael Tilson Thomas, Kenneth Kiesler, Michael Morgan, and others. He also studied the viola with Richard Wolfe in Amsterdam and Ivo-Jan van der Werff in Houston. Carrettín has been active in all the fields he studied. He gave his conducting debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Kishinev, Moldova, and has since conducted orchestras in Eastern Europe, South America, and the U.S., the latter group including the Oakland Youth Symphony and the Houston Youth Symphony Sinfonia. Taking up historical instruments, he has performed on violin, viola, and cello da spalla (a small Baroque cello held on the arm), with such groups as the American Bach Soloists, Musica Angelica, and New York's Holy Trinity Bach Vespers Orchestra, and he has traveled to archives in Italy to research music in library manuscripts. He has been heard at the Wolf Trap summer venue outside Washington, D.C. and the Stavanger Festival in Norway, as well as in a private concert for the Sultan of Oman and his family. Carrettín's chamber music collaborators are a distinguished group, including the Tokyo String Quartet, the guitar-playing Assad Brothers, and pianist Joyce Yang. As an electric violin soloist with the genre-crossing Project Bandaloop, he has also shared stages with such pop and rock artists as Joan Jett, Ray Charles, and The Black Crowes, and he has often toured with composer and keyboardist Yanni. Carrettín is the music director of the Boulder Bach Festival and is the founder of its COmpass Resonance Ensemble. He has served at the University of St. Thomas as orchestra director and at Sam Houston State University as the director of orchestral studies, and he has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Carrettín has made several recordings on the Sono Luminus label, joining pianist Mina Gajic for a historical-instrument recording of Schubert sonatinas in 2020, and returning the following year with an album of Bach solo cello suites recorded on a historical viola.
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