At just 23, former DeKalb County resident and double bass phenom Nina Bernat has already amassed the kind of accolades that most dedicated players accrue over the course of decades. She is a decorated veteran of the competition circuit and a regular touring performer while still plowing away at her studies at The Juilliard School.
That rigorous performance schedule includes a homecoming of sorts: Bernat will take the stage at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Saturday at 7 p.m. The performance, a presentation of the Nancy Frampton Rising Artists Series, will see Bernat take the spotlight with minimal accompaniment.
The double bass entered Bernat’s life naturally — her father is Mark Bernat, a double bassist and former member of the Israel Philharmonic. “I got started at around 6 or 7, which is pretty young for a bass player,” she says. “At that point, my brother had already started taking piano lessons, so I was surrounded by music from a pretty young age.”
Some 15 years later, Bernat is in her seventh year at Juilliard, pursuing an artist diploma, a two-year post-graduate program for pre-professional musicians. “I have another year left of this program, and then I’m off to be a professional freelancer, chamber musician and soloist around New York City,” she says.
She describes her exciting future with a youthful, blasé tone that belies the magnitude of the road ahead: 2024 will see her join the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s prestigious Bowers Program, a rigorous training to nourish an elite few in the new generation of up-and-coming chamber musicians. At the same time, she will continue to tour and perform in New York City.
It’s a far cry from growing up just down the road from Lakeside High School in DeKalb County. Bernat is quick to admit that her memories of the area are dim — she and her family moved there when she was 2 and stayed there for about eight years so her parents could work at Emory University — her father teaching bass and her mother in neuroscience.
It was here that she began her musical journey. “I started out playing piano, which was just because my brother was playing piano already, and I would have to go wait at the piano teacher’s house,” she says.
The piano may have been a foot in the door, but it would be her father’s presence that naturally transitioned her to the double bass. “My dad encouraged it a little bit, but I was pretty interested in and excited about music from an early age,” she says. “And my dad was a professional, so it wasn’t super weird for me to think of a career in music as plausible.”
The fatherly influence would help shape Bernat’s journey with her instrument. Mark Bernat is known for transferring the works of Johann Sebastian Bach to the double bass. His work has informed Bernat’s own focus within her development. “With bass there’s not so many pieces that are written originally for us,” she says. “So a lot of the music that I’m interested in was originally written for the violin, the cello or the voice. One of my passions, like my dad, is transcribing music for other instruments so that they can be played on the bass.”
Bernat will perform some of those transposed pieces at the Morningside concert with Brahms’ cello sonata in E Minor as well as music by Sergei Prokofiev. The latter is Bernat’s own transcription.
Chamber music has become a passion for Bernat. She was initially interested in being part of an orchestra and even appeared as a guest principal bassist with the Israel Symphony Orchestra in 2019. “I realized how much music there is to be explored in the chamber music world,” she says. “It’s a very stable job to be in an orchestra, but being around other young musicians that have started careers and been successful just playing chamber music made me realize that it is possible.”
She further notes that the more intimate format of chamber music affords the players greater opportunities for personal expression. “It’s a much closer and more personal collaboration,” she says. “You can bring your personality and musicianship to the table in a way you can’t necessarily do in an orchestra, where you have to be part of the group.”
That intimacy will be at the forefront of Bernat’s Saturday performance, where she will perform with Morningside organist and choirmaster Johnathan Crutchfield providing the sole accompaniment on piano. “I’ve never played with him before, so we’re going to do a crash rehearsal in the couple days preceding. Hopefully, everything will work out,” she smiles with a hint of worry in her voice.
There can be little doubt that such an expression of concern is perfunctory. For such a young player, Bernat is remarkably cool and collected — an assuredness that transcends her years and, like the playing itself, places her among the modern chamber music world’s brightest stars.
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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.
