Canadian-born violinist Martin Beaver was First Violin of the world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet from June 2002 until its final concert in July 2013.  As such, he appeared to critical and public acclaim on the major stages of the world including New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Berliner Philharmonie, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall and the Sydney Opera House.

As a member of the Tokyo String Quartet, Mr. Beaver was privileged to perform on the 1727 Stradivarius violin from the “Paganini Quartet” set of instruments, on generous loan to the quartet from the Nippon Music Foundation.  Recordings of the Tokyo String Quartet during his tenure notably include the complete Beethoven string quartets on the Harmonia Mundi label.

Mr. Beaver’s concerto and recital appearances span four continents with orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège and the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra and under the batons of Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Raymond Leppard, Gilbert Varga and Yannick Nézet-Séguin among others.  Chamber music performances include collaborations with such eminent artists as Leon Fleisher, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell, Sabine Meyer and Yefim Bronfman.

Mr. Beaver is a regular guest at prominent festivals in North America and abroad. Among these are: the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla SummerFest, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Edinburgh Festival (U.K.) and Pacific Music Festival (Japan).  Additionally, he was a founding member of several notable chamber ensembles including Triskelion and the Montrose Trio.

Mr. Beaver’s discography includes concerti, sonatas and chamber music on the Harmonia Mundi USA, Biddulph, Naim Audio, René Gailly, Musica Viva, SM 5000, Toccata Classics and Naxos labels.  His recorded repertoire ranges from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms to the music of 21^st century composers Alexina Louie, Gerard Schurmann and Joan Tower.

Following his early studies with Claude Letourneau and Carlisle Wilson, Mr. Beaver was a pupil of Victor Danchenko, Josef Gingold and Henryk Szeryng.  He is a laureate of the Queen Elisabeth, Montreal and Indianapolis competitions. Subsequently, he has served on the juries of major international competitions including the Queen Elisabeth and Montreal violin competitions, the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition and the Banff International String Quartet Competition.

Over the course of his career, Mr. Beaver has been the grateful recipient of generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts.  This includes Arts Grants for his studies at Indiana University, Career Development Grants and the 1993 Virginia-Parker Prize.  In 1998, through the generosity of an anonymous donor, the Canada Council awarded Mr. Beaver the loan of the 1729 “ex-Heath” Guarnerius del Gesù violin for a four-year period.

A devoted educator, Mr. Beaver has conducted masterclasses throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.  He has held teaching positions at the Royal Conservatory of Music, the University of British Columbia and the Peabody Conservatory.  More recently, he served on the faculty of New York University and as Artist in Residence at the Yale School of Music, where he was awarded its highest honor - the Sanford Medal.

Mr. Beaver joined the faculty of the Colburn School in Los Angeles in August 2013 where he is currently Professor of Violin and Chamber Music.

Icelandic violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson joined the Oberlin Conservatory faculty in 2017 after performing for the previous 17 years with the Pacifica Quartet, with which he won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance, Musical America Ensemble of the Year honors, and the Avery Fisher Career Grant.

As a member of the Pacifica Quartet, Bernhardsson appeared in more than 90 concerts worldwide each year, including engagements in Wigmore Hall (London), the Vienna Konzerthaus, Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall (New York), and other major venues. He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, and the Reykjavík Arts Festival, and has collaborated with Menahem Pressler, Yo-Yo Ma, Jörg Widmann, Lynn Harrell, Leon Fleisher, the Emerson String Quartet, Johannes Moser, and members of the Guarneri and Cleveland quartets. His television appearances include The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and the MTV Europe Music Awards with Icelandic artist Björk. He appears on 16 recordings with the Pacifica Quartet and has recorded the violin music of Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson and the sonatas for violin and piano by Franz Schubert.

Bernhardsson serves as director of the Cooper International Violin Competition at Oberlin and as artistic director of Iceland’s Harpa International Music Academy. He gives regular concerts and master classes in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has appeared as a soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, CityMusic Cleveland, and other ensembles.

Bernhardsson is a 1995 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory. His teachers include Guðný Guðmundsdóttir, Almita and Roland Vamos, Mathias Tacke, and Shmuel Ashkenasi. He previously served on the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.

Milan Milisavljević is Principal Viola with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. His performances combine intense expression with an immediate and profound link to his listeners and have won much critical acclaim.

The Strad magazine has described his playing as “very imaginative, with a fine, cultured tone.” Milan’s solo album Sonata-Song, released by Delos Music, has received glowing reviews, with the recording of Aram Khachaturian’s solo sonata on the album hailed as “definitive”.

He has won prizes at competitions such as Lionel Tertis and Aspen Lower Strings and has performed at Marlboro, Cascade Head, Classical Tahoe, Mostly Mozart, Josef Gingold, and Grand Teton music festivals.

Milan has appeared as soloist throughout the world, with orchestras such as the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonic orchestras of Belgrade, Medellín, and Boca del Río, Aspen Sinfonia, New York Classical Players, Classical Tahoe, and others. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with members of the Guarneri and Mendelssohn String Quartets, as well as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Joseph Kalichstein, Augustin Hadelich, Cho-Liang Lin, and many others.

Milan has been heard worldwide on countless recordings and broadcasts of the MET. He previously served as its Assistant Principal Viola for 11 seasons. He is a former member of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and has served as guest Principal Viola of many orchestras, such as the Toronto Symphony.

As an educator, Milan has given classes at universities and conservatories worldwide, such as at the Juilliard School and the Rubin Academy of Music, the Verbier Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Milan is on the viola faculty of the Mannes School of Music as well as New York University.

He is also increasingly in demand as a conductor, serving on the conducting faculty of the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division as head of one of its orchestras.

Deeply committed to music of today, Milan has given the world premiere of Afro-Cuban composer Leo Brouwer’s Solo Viola Sonata, and regularly performs new music by Ana Sokolovic, Jessie Montgomery, and others. One of his recent projects has been Slow Beethoven, collaborating with Lara St. John, Miranda Cuckson and Jeffrey Zeigler, in a unique creation of a lush sonic landscape based on the world of Beethoven’s late string quartets.

Milan’s teachers include Jutta Puchhammer, Atar Arad, James Dunham, Nobuko Imai, and Samuel Rhodes. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Rice University.

Alan Stepansky is recognized as one of the most gifted and versatile cellists of his generation. After a distinguished orchestral career playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, serving as Principal Cellist of the Boston Pops, and culminating in a ten-year tenure as Associate Principal Cellist of the New York Philharmonic, he is in demand as a soloist, chamber musician, principal cellist, and recording artist. He is currently Chair of Strings and Professor of Cello at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and cello faculty of the Manhattan School of Music.

Mr. Stepansky has performed as a guest artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has appeared in concert with a diverse array of artists including the Takács and American String Quartets. He has recorded a series of chamber music and solo discs for EMI, which were honored by Gramophone Magazine, BBC Magazine, the New York Times, and the British Music Industry Association, and has been engaged as the solo cellist for numerous major motion picture soundtracks. He has also appeared on the albums of many noted recording artists across many genres, including Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Merchant, David Byrne, Audra McDonald, Joss Stone, and Sting, with whom he has also appeared in concert.

Recently, Mr. Stepansky served as the Principal Cellist for six major fund-raising events held in Carnegie Hall, Beethoven’s Ninth for South Asia, Requiem for Darfur, Mahler for the Children of AIDS, Beethoven for the Indus Valley, Shostakovich for the Children of Syria, and the Scheherazade Initiative, which featured an international orchestra drawn from leading symphonic, chamber music, and solo artists from around the world. He has appeared as soloist with many orchestras and frequently as Guest Principal Cellist of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. After studies at the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Stepansky graduated from Harvard University with the Horblit Prize, conferred for his outstanding musical accomplishments.

Mr. Stepansky has been a member of the Music Academy faculty since 2003.

Scott Pingel has been the principal bass of the San Francisco Symphony since 2004. He has appeared numerous times with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and at the Music@Menlo and Music in the Vineyards festivals. Versatile in a variety of styles, Pingel has performed in jazz clubs from New York to Stockholm, and his solo work with the iconic heavy metal band, Metallica, was seen by millions worldwide and hailed as "show stopping" by Rolling Stone. He has taught masterclasses throughout North America, Asia, and Europe and was among the first bassists selected to teach for Tonebase, the preeminent online music learning platform. He has served as a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and is currently a faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His former students have won prestigious international solo competitions and gained employment with major symphony orchestras and conservatories.

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Denk returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and in recent seasons has appeared with the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and The Cleveland Orchestra, as well as on tour with Academy of St Martin in the Fields and at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.

In 2019-2020, until the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of all performances, Denk toured Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier Book 1 extensively, and was to have performances culminate with Lincoln Center in New York and the Barbican in London. He returned to Carnegie Hall to perform Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and made his solo debut at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. He also made his solo recital debut at the Boulez Saal in Berlin performing works by Bach, Ligeti, Berg, and Schumann, and returned to the Piano aux Jacobins Festival in France, as well as London’s Wigmore Hall. Further performances abroad included his debut with the Bournemouth Symphony, his returns to the City of Birmingham Symphony and the Piano Espoo Festival in Finland, and recitals of the complete Ives Violin Sonatas with Stefan Jackiw.

Highlights of the previous season included a three-week recital tour, culminating in Denk’s return to Carnegie Hall; play-directing Mozart Concerti on an extensive tour with Academy of St Martin in the Fields; and a nationwide trio tour with Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis. He also performed and curated a series of Mozart Violin Sonatas (‘Denk & Friends’) at Carnegie Hall.

Denk is also known for his original and insightful writing on music, which Alex Ross praises for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” He wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic, The Guardian, and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. One of his New Yorker contributions, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” forms the basis of a book for future publication by Random House in the US, and Macmillan in the UK.

Denk’s recording of the Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts. His recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, and the Washington Post, and his account of the Beethoven sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano. Denk has a long-standing attachment to the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and his recording of Ives’s two piano sonatas also featured in many “best of the year” lists. His recording c.1300-c.2000 was released in 2018 with music ranging from Guillaume de Machaut, Gilles Binchois and Carlo Gesualdo, to Stockhausen, Ligeti and Glass.

Jeremy Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and The Juilliard School. He lives in New York City, and his website and blog are at jeremydenk.com.

Mr. Denk has been a Music Academy of the West faculty artist since 2015.

MITSURU YONEZAKI 26, born in Yokohama, Japan, has recently completed her graduate certificate at New England Conservatory, where she studied with Donald Weilerstein. She has recently performed with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, in a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 8 conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

GRACIE MCFALLS 23, born in Los Angeles, California, has recently completed her bachelors at Oberlin College, studying with Peter Slowik and Hsin-Yun Huang. She was a finalist in the 2024 Oberlin Concerto Competition and has held positions with the Oberlin Orchestra. She has been a fellow at the Pacific Music Festival and Colorado College.

JAMES ANTONI RENK 20, born in San Diego, California, is earning his bachelor's degree at University of California, Los Angeles. He won 1st place in the 2019 Mainly Mozart Advanced Orchestra Solo Competition, and was a quarter-finalist in the 2022 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. He performed Mahler's Symphony No. 6 with UCLA Philharmonia.

KARIM MAGGIO 23, born in Herndon, Virginia, is earning his master's degree at The Juilliard School, studying with Natasha Brofsky. He received the 2024 Presser Foundation Undergraduate Scholar Award, is a Section Cellist with the Canton Symphony Orchestra, and a Substitute Cellist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.