Dr. Diego Vásquez is an interdisciplinary musician who loves to play the clarinet and twerk. He is Principal Clarinet of the Berkshire Opera Festival and Acting Principal of Cayuga Chamber Orchestra (CCO). His debut EP, “Dr Diego,” was released in 2022 from the seeds of classic deep house, disco, chiptunes and baroque organ music. He is currently working on an audio/visual album with composer Mark Olivieri.
Much of Vásquez’s work involves dance. In 2022 he worked for the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and the Lucerne Theater in the site-specific "STYX Tour: A Rendezvous with the Dead." For the 2017-2018 season Vásquez was dancer/mime soloist in Karlheinz Stockhausen's INORI, produced by the Lucerne Festival and the Stockhausen Foundation, with performances at the Luzern KKL and the Berlin Philharmonie under the baton of Péter Eötvös. In 2019 Vásquez performed Stockhausen’s KLANG in Montreal, and UVERSA at Zelyonka Space Up in Kiev, Ukraine’s largest modern dance festival. He is scheduled to perform INORI with the Essen Philharmonie (Germany) in October 2026. Vásquez recently designed a new course at Ithaca College, called The Choreography of Music, exploring interdisciplinary performance art history and practice.
Vásquez is an active orchestral musician in the New York region. In addition to CCO, he is regularly invited to perform with the The Syracuse Orchestra, Binghamton Philharmonic, Tri-Cities Opera, Orchestra of the Southern Fingerlakes, Ensemble X, among others.
Diego completed his Doctor of Musical Arts at The Hartt School with a dissertation entitled “The Clarinet Writing in Wagner’s Parsifal as Synthesis of the Wagner/Nietzsche Relationship," his Master of Music from Mannes College The New School and his Bachelors of Music from Ithaca College. He has studied music history with Ira Braus and clarinet with Richard Faria, Ayako Oshima and Charles Neidich.
Upcoming performances include Gerald Finzi’s Five Bagatelles, op.23 with Gabriela Gómez Estévez and the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, and in early 2026: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the National Symphony of Cuba, in Havana.
You can visit his website here.