Ellen Dinwiddie Smith

Guest Musician

Ellen Dinwiddie Smith has been a member of the Minnesota Orchestra since 1993 and currently serves as third horn. She contributes to Twin Cities musical life as the creator of a chamber music series, guest soloist, chamber music performer and private instructor. She serves on the board of the Twin Cities Horn Club and is a brass sectional leader for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies.

Smith developed the Colonial Chamber Series, launched in 2006, and organized the Musicians for Tsunami Relief benefit concert (2005) and Community Emergency Service Benefit Concert (2012), both held at Colonial Church in Edina. She has performed with the Lakes Chamber Music Society in Alexandria, Minnesota and the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival and collaborated with the Dale Warland Singers on their CD Britten, Bernstein, et al., as a soloist in Aharon Harlap’s Bat Yiftach (Jephthah’s Daughter).

In 2014, she was a featured artist at the Mid-South Horn Workshop in Austin, Texas, performed with her colleagues at the Mid-North Horn Workshop at the University of St. Thomas, as well as a featured artist at the 2003 International Horn Society Workshop at Indiana University. Smith is a Young-Artist-Program faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music Summerfest and has served as an artist-teacher on the faculty of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. She spent many summers on the faculty of the Kendall Betts Horn Camp in Littleton, New Hampshire. As a guest soloist, she has appeared with the National Repertory Orchestra, Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra, Kenwood Symphony Orchestra, Linden Hills Chamber Orchestra and will perform with the Mississippi Valley Symphony Orchestra in fall 2016. Smith is a 1987 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Myron Bloom and was a member of the Curtis Wind Quintet, which won a top prize in the Fischoff Chamber Music competition. Prior to studies at Curtis, Smith attended the Juilliard School and the University of Texas at Austin. Her teachers included Wayne Barrington, Greg Hustis and Michael Hatfield. She was named third horn of the Charleston (South Carolina) Symphony Orchestra while still a student at Curtis and later joined the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra as co-principal horn. She has performed at the Spoleto, Waterloo, Chautauqua, Keystone, Colorado Philharmonic and Aspen summer music festivals.

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