Noted for her…”dazzling…and winning tonal beauty and eloquence,” (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle), Amy Likar is an active freelancer and chamber musician based in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Expanding on her work as a flutist, Amy became fascinated with performance health and wellness through her own recovery from stress-related injuries. In all of her work, Amy is dedicated to helping musicians find the freedom to be fully themselves.
Highlights of her performance career include a critically acclaimed premiere of Martin Rokeach’s Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra, in addition to the premieres of solo and chamber works by Valerie Coleman, Michael Stephens, Donald Sloan and Daniel Felsenfeld.
Dedicated to helping other musicians reach their full potential, Amy has mentored and credentialed over 75 professionals as the Director of Training for the Association for Body Mapping Education. These educators are now teaching in their own private studios and in institutions such as the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Amsterdam Conservatoire, Columbus State University and Oberlin Conservatory.
Likar serves on the faculty at Saint Mary’s College of California as instructor of flute and is a member of the Oakland Symphony.
As a guest artist, she regularly offers performance residencies and workshops that focus on getting to the essence of music making.
She is a Verne Q. Powell Performing Artist and available for custom clinics and residencies.
She is grateful for all of the mentorship she has received from Dawn Baker Carson, Martha Aarons, Katherine Borst Jones, Peter Lloyd and Tim Day, as well as practicing and musicianship mentorship from Burton Kaplan.
Interviewed by Kent State University in its “Alumni Spotlight”.
Artist Review:
San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 2016Rokeach’s concerto was the centerpiece of Friday’s concert by the Oakland Symphony under Music Director Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theatre. It featured a dazzling solo turn by Amy Likar, who sounded entirely in sympathy with the work’s fundamental premises.
In particular, Likar was clearly intent on bringing out the more expressive vein in Rokeach’s writing, and outlining a dramatic relationship between soloist and orchestra that was not quite antagonistic — in the manner of traditional Classical and Romantic concertos — and yet not quite collaborative either.
And in the long-breathed melodies of the slow movement, which Likar delivered with winning tonal beauty and eloquence, you can hear a new kind of character being forged for the piccolo. It’s the kind of thing that instrumentalists all over might undertake.
-Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle