Steven Klimowski
Clarinet
Steven Klimowski began his performing career at the age of sixteen as a tour guide at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. With childhood interests of baseball, science and Boy Scouts, his life direction was changed when his high school band director gave him an inspiring recording of Mahler’s 10th Symphony. After high school he went to NYC to study clarinet with the famed Leon Russianoff, hitchhiking across the country four times in ensuing summers to get back home. He ushered at Carnegie Hall, was a shopping mall janitor, flipped burgers at fast food restaurants and taught ghetto children at a home for dependent children before landing his first orchestra job with the Orquesta Sinfonico del Estado de Mexico. There he met his wife, cellist, Bonnie Klimowski. They moved to Vermont in 1980.
In 1987 Klimowski founded the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. He has played with the Vermont Symphony and the Mozart Festival. Steve is currently the principal clarinet with the Burlington Chamber Orchestra and plays with Raising Cane the VSO woodwind trio.
He is the adjunct clarinet teacher at the University of Vermont, Saint Michael’s College and Middlebury College. More recently he has taken up choral conducting with the choir at the Jericho Congregational Church and studied choral conducting with James Jordan of Westminster Choir College attending the WCC choral institute for several summers and the Choral Institute at Oxford in 2017. Mr. Klimowski has twice been honored with an individual artist’s fellowship from the Vermont Council on the Arts and received its Citation of Merit. When not absorbed with music, Steve enjoys fine dining, cycling, hiking and cultivating garlic at his home in Fairfax, Vermont where he lives with his wife and three cats.
