An internationally recognized double bass soloist, chamber musician, and recording artist, Nico Abondolo was appointed principal double bass of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra during the 2011-12 season. He made his debut at age 14 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and in 1983 became the first double bassist to win first place in the International Competition for Musical Performers in Geneva, Switzerland. He has since appeared with orchestras and in recital throughout the United States and Europe.

Mr. Abondolo regularly performs chamber music at the La Jolla Music Society SummerFest and the Ojai and St. Barts festivals, and with the experimental chamber ensemble Concert Nova. Recent highlights include performances of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Schubert’s Trout Quintet with the Brentano String Quartet, John Adams’ Shaker Loops, and Tan Dun’s Quintet, the latter two with the composers conducting. He has appeared with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and has toured with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Claudio Abbado, Sir Georg Solti, and Lorin Maazel.

Mr. Abondolo has premiered solo works by Sofia Gubaidulina and Henry Brant, and has received composition commissions from Concert Nova and Chamber Music Unbound. He was the double bassist for the New York-based ensemble Continuum and for eight seasons served as principal bass for San Francisco’s Grammy-nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra. He has composed for several New York and West Coast dance companies, performing with them at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Merce Cunningham Studio, and the La MaMa Experimental Theatre (New York). He was the composer for two PBS documentaries, “Half the Sky”, and “A Path Appears”. He has also served as principal bass for many motion picture composers, including John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Alan Silvestri, and Thomas Newman.

Maintaining a busy schedule of masterclasses at music schools throughout the country, Mr. Abondolo is currently on the faculty of Westmont College, and previously was a faculty member at the USC Thornton School of Music and UC Santa Barbara. He studied with Dennis Trembly, Peter Mercurio, and Gábor Rejt at USC; David Walter and Albert Fuller at The Juilliard School; and Franco Petracchi in Italy.

Canadian 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 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).

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 living 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 2009 Queen Elisabeth and 2010 Montreal violin competitions, the 2014 and 2017 Osaka International Chamber Music Competitions and the 2015 Melbourne International Chamber Music 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.  He joined the faculty of the Colburn School in Los Angeles in August 2013 where he is currently Professor of Violin and Chamber Music.

Martin Beaver is proud to be a founding member of the Montrose Trio with pianist Jon Kimura Parker and cellist Clive Greensmith.

Mr. Beaver performs on a 1789 Nicolo Bergonzi violin.

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.

LA Phil's First Associate Concertmaster Nathan Cole, who joined the LA Phil in 2011, has appeared as guest concertmaster with the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Minnesota, Houston, Ottawa, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. He was previously a member of the Chicago Symphony and Principal Second Violin of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. A native of Lexington, KY, he made his debut with the Louisville Orchestra at the age of 10 while studying with Donna Wiehe. After eight years working with Daniel Mason, Cole enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music. In addition to his studies there with Pamela Frank, Felix Galimir, Ida Kavafian, and Jaime Laredo, Cole formed the Grancino String Quartet, debuting in New York’s Weill Hall. Several summers at Marlboro enriched his love of chamber music. 

Violinist Glenn Dicterow has established himself worldwide as one of the most prominent American concert artists of his generation.

Mr. Dicterow has enjoyed a storied career. The concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 34 years, an all-time record in that major orchestral position, he became the first holder of the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music at the USC Thornton School of Music in 2013. He is also the Chairman of the Orchestral Performance Program at New York’s Manhattan School of Music. More than ever before, Dicterow performs as a soloist with orchestras around the nation and beyond, while participating in musical festivals and chamber music, teaching in musical academies and leading masterclasses around the world, while adjudicating competitions, among a plethora of musical assignments in a “second act” easily as active as his much lauded years with the Philharmonic.

Glenn Dicterow first came to prominence at the age of 11, making his solo debut in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where his father, Harold Dicterow, served as principal of the second violin section for 52 years. He first appeared with the New York Philharmonic in 1967, at the age of 18, performing the Tchaikovsky Concerto under the baton of André Kostelanetz.

Dicterow joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Associate Concertmaster in 1971, becoming Concertmaster there before turning 25. He came to New York as that orchestra’s Concertmaster in 1980, while soloing annually with the Philharmonic in each of his 34 years. In that time, he served as the orchestra’s “leader” (to use the British term) in collaboration with four very different music directors, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel and Alan Gilbert

In a New York Philharmonic concert tour Dicterow was featured as the soloist in Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade After Plato’s Symposium, with Bernstein himself conducting. He performed the Waxman/Bizet Carmen Fantasy under Zubin Mehta as part of the New York Philharmonic’s “Live From Lincoln Center” telecast, and he was a soloist in the orchestra’s 1982 concert at the White House. Another career highlight was his performance of the Barber Violin Concerto at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China during the Philharmonic’s 1998 tour of Asia.

His shelf of recordings is endless, as the Philharmonic’s Concertmaster, in a large array of solo assignments, both of the great romantic concerti and of the 20th Century classics that he has championed, and in a wide range of chamber music. He has twice recorded Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade with the New York Philharmonic, once with Yuri Temirkanov conducting, once with Kurt Masur. He and his wife, violist Karen Dreyfus, have committed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante to disc, alongside the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Carl St.Clair. He has recorded violin sonatas by such heroes of American music as Ives, Copland, Bernstein, and John Corigliano.

“The Glenn Dicterow Collection,” a three-CD set on the New York Philharmonic label, surveys his career with the orchestra, in performances spanning thirty years, from 1982 - 2012, featuring his performances of concerti by Bruch, Bartok, Barber, Korngold, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Szymanowski, plus the Bernstein Serenade, Kernis’s Lament and Prayer, and John Williams’s Theme From Schindler’s List, among many highlights.

As a sidelight, Dicterow has also provided the violin solos for numerous Hollywood films, including such modern classics as The Turning Point, The Untouchables, Altered States, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Interview With the Vampire, among others.

A graduate of The Juilliard School, where he was a student of Ivan Galamian, he also studied with Joachim Chassman, Naoum Blinder, Manuel Compinsky, Erno Neufeld, Gerald Vinci, Eudice Shapiro, Jascha Heifetz and Henryk Szeryng.

Today, Dicterow is as committed to passing on the great musical legacy that spurred his own career as he once was in his orchestral duties. Beside his endowed chair at the USC-Thornton School and his innovative work in the Manhattan School’s orchestral program, he is the leader of the String Leadership Program at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West, training new generations of concertmasters and principal second violinists.

Among his many honors, the Young Musicians Foundation, a Los Angeles institution which has spurred the careers of innumerable artists, honored Dicterow in February 2015 with its “Living the Legacy Award.” It should be noted that in his early teens, Dicterow, who is now on the YMF Advisory Board, won that organization’s Debut Concerto Competition in 1963.

Glenn Dicterow and his wife, Karen Dreyfus, are founding members of the Lyric Piano Quartet and the Amerigo Trio, performing, recording, teaching and proselytizing at leading festivals and musical institutions around the world.

He joined the Music Academy faculty in 2014.

Karen Dreyfus enjoys a wide-ranging career as a noted soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician and as a pedagogue. She has performed extensively in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America, and has toured with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Musicians from Marlboro, and the New York Philharmonic. Her numerous honors include prizes at the Naumburg, Lionel Tertis, Washington International, and the Hudson Valley competitions. Along with her work in the classical music field, Dreyfus has performed on many film scores, pop, jazz, and rock recordings.

The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Award, Ms. Dreyfus has recorded many CDs as a soloist and chamber musician. Her premiere recording with Bridge Records, Romanze, met with considerable critical acclaim. She has recorded William Walton’s Viola Concerto, Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante”, as well as solo works by American composers. Such composers as Ezra Laderman, Jon Deak, George Tsontakis, Paul Chihara, William Thomas McKinley, Elizabeth Brown, and others have written works expressly for her. Dreyfus has toured with jazz pianist/composer Chick Corea and recorded a Grammy- nominated work entitled “Lyric Suite for Sextet.”

In 2014 Ms. Dreyfus was invited to teach on the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music where she continues to teach viola, chamber music, and orchestral studies. Dreyfus has taught on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Mannes School along with the Manhattan School of Music where she was honored with an Emerita Award in 2022 after more than 30 years on faculty. Many of Karen Dreyfus’ students have gone on to win positions in orchestras, teach on university faculties, as well as play in chamber ensembles.

Karen Dreyfus is a founding member of the Lyric Piano Quartet and the Amerigo Trio.

She has been a Music Academy teaching artist since 2014.

David Geber had his early musical training in Los Angeles, where he was raised in a family of professional cellists.  He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The Juilliard School.  Mr. Geber has been recipient of numerous cello and chamber music awards, including the Walter W. Naumburg Award and the Coleman Chamber Music Prize.  He has appeared as soloist at Tanglewood Music Center and Aspen Music Festival, as well as with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Montreal Symphony and New York Chamber Symphony.  A strong supporter of new music, he has premiered numerous works for cello and chamber ensembles.  As founding cellist of the American String Quartet, he concertized and recorded internationally with that ensemble for nearly thirty years, having given concerts in all 50 of the United States and playing up to 100 annual engagements.

Mr. Geber is a longtime cello and chamber music faculty member at Manhattan School of Music cello and served as a senior administrator of the school for 15 years.  In addition to being artist/faculty at Music Academy of the West, he maintains other festival relationships with National Arts Centre of Canada and Heifetz Institute. Prior festival posts have included Aspen Music Festival & School, Meadowmount School of Music and Tanglewood Music Center. He is also an exclusive, worldwide artist/representative for Jargar Strings.

Mr. Geber has recorded for Albany Records, Capstone Records, CRI, Musical Heritage Society, New World Records, Nonesuch Records, and RCA.  He has served as adjudicator for major international string competitions including Bordeaux, Evian, Naumburg, Isang Yun and Coleman.  He is Vice President of both the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation (New York City) and American Friends of Kronberg Academy (Germany).  He plays a rare Ruggieri cello, made in Cremona in 1667.

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.

Newly appointed violist of the Takács Quartet, Richard O’Neill has distinguished himself as one of the great instrumentalists of his generation. GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Instrumental Solo Performance in 2021, O’Neill is only the second person to receive an award for a viola performance in the history of this category. Also an EMMY Award winner and Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, O’Neill has appeared as soloist with the world’s top orchestras and conductors including Andrew Davis, Vladimir Jurowski and Yannick Nezet-Seguin. An Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Principal Violist of Camerata Pacifica, he also served as Artistic Director of DITTO, his South Korean chamber music project, for thirteen seasons, leading the ensemble on international tours to China and Japan and introducing tens of thousands to music. A Universal Music/Deutsche Grammophon recording artist, he has made 10 solo albums and many other chamber music recordings, earning multiple platinum discs. Composers Lera Auerbach, Elliott Carter, Paul Chihara, John Harbison, and Huang Ruo have written works for him. He serves as Goodwill Ambassador for the Korean Red Cross, The Special Olympics, UNICEF and OXFAM and serves on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West and is an Music Academy alumnus (‘98, ‘99).

Esteemed violist Cynthia Phelps’s wide-ranging career has taken her to stages across the world as soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and pedagogue. Principal Violist of the New York Philharmonic for over two decades, she is a regularly featured soloist with the orchestra both at home and abroad, in a variety of repertoire, including two world premieres written solely for her. Other concerto appearances have been with the Minnesota Orchestra, Shanghai, Vermont, Santa Barbara, Eastern Music Festival, and San Diego Symphonies, Orquesta Sinfonica de Bilbao, and Rochester and Hong Kong Philharmonics.  Known for her emotional nuance, virtuosic technique, and plush tone, she is a founding member of both the New York Philharmonic String Quartet and Les Amies trio and is a frequent guest with chamber series across the globe. She has been featured in several nationwide "Live from Lincoln Center" telecasts, on National Public Radio, Radio France, Italy‘s RAI, and in regular broadcasts from the 92Y, including collaborations with Emanuel Ax and Daniil Trifonov. She is on the faculty of The Juilliard School Shanghai Academy, Music Academy of the West, and Mannes College of Music.

Ms. Phelps attended the Music Academy in 1979 and 1983, and was named a recipient of the Music Academy's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2001.

The world-renowned Takács Quartet, is now entering its forty-eighth season. Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), Richard O’Neill (viola) and András Fejér (cello) are excited about the 2022-2023 season that begins with a tour of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, and includes the release of two new cds for Hyperion Records. A disc of Haydn’s opp. 42, 77 and 103 is followed by the first recording of an extraordinary new work written for the Takács by Stephen Hough, Les Six Rencontres, presented with quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux. As Associate Artists at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Takács will perform four concerts there. In addition to programs featuring Beethoven, Schubert and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, one concert consists of works by Britten, Bartók and Dvořák that highlight the same themes of displacement and return explored in Edward Dusinberre’s new book Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home. The book is published by Faber and the University of Chicago Press in the Fall of 2022. The quartet will perform the same program at several venues in the USA, complemented by book talks. During this season the quartet will continue its fruitful partnership with pianist Jeremy Denk, performing on several North American series.

Throughout 2022 and 2023 the ensemble will play at prestigious European venues including the Edinburgh and Schwetzingen Festivals, Madrid’s Auditorio de Música, Bilbao’s Philharmonic Society, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Bath Mozartfest. The group’s North American engagements include concerts in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tucson, Portland and the Beethoven Center at San Jose State University.

The Takács Quartet is known for innovative programming. In 2021-22 the ensemble partnered with  bandoneon virtuoso Julien Labro to premiere new works by Clarice Assad and Bryce Dessner, commissioned by Music Accord. In 2014 the Takács performed a program inspired by Philip Roth’s novel Everyman with Meryl Streep at Princeton, and again with her at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto in 2015. They first performed Everyman at Carnegie Hall in 2007 with Philip Seymour Hoffman. They have toured 14 cities with the poet Robert Pinsky, and played regularly with the Hungarian Folk group Muzsikas.

The Takács records for Hyperion Records, recently winning awards for their recordings of string quartets by Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, and - with pianist Garrick Ohlsson - piano quintets by Amy Beach and Elgar. Other releases for Hyperion feature works by Haydn, Schubert, Janáček, Smetana, Debussy and Britten, as well as piano quintets by César Franck and Shostakovich (with Marc-André Hamelin), and viola quintets by Brahms and Dvorák (with Lawrence Power). For their CDs on the Decca/London label, the Quartet has won three Gramophone Awards, a Grammy Award, three Japanese Record Academy Awards, Disc of the Year at the inaugural BBC Music Magazine Awards, and Ensemble Album of the Year at the Classical Brits. Full details of all recordings can be found in the Recordings section of the Quartet's website.

In 2014 the Takács became the first string quartet to be awarded the Wigmore Hall Medal. In 2012, Gramophone announced that the Takács was the first string quartet to be inducted into its Hall of Fame. The ensemble also won the 2011 Award for Chamber Music and Song presented by the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the members of the Takács Quartet are Christoffersen Faculty Fellows, and the grateful beneficiaries of an instrument loan by the Drake Foundation. The members of the Takács are on the faculty at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where they run a summer string quartet seminar, and Visiting Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music, London.

The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. The group received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982.

Acclaimed as “a wonderfully talented violinist…whose sound and technique go well beyond her years”,  violinist Yoonshin Song was born in South Korea, where she began her musical studies at age 5. Making her solo debut with the Seoul Philharmonic at age 11, she has since built a successful performing career internationally.

Yoonshin was appointed as Concertmaster of the Houston Symphony in August 2019. Prior to that she has held the same position with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for seven seasons. Yoonshin has also served as guest concertmaster of the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer.

Beyond her first chair duties, Yoonshin has performed as a soloist with many orchestras around the world, including the Houston Symphony, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, the New Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, the Paul Constantinescu Philharmonic Orchestra, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the KBS Philharmonic Orchestra, among many others. The highlights of her 2020-2021 season as a soloist include concertos with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Houston Symphony and the New Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra.

She has also participated as a soloist and chamber musician in numerous leading music festivals, including the Marlboro, Deer Valley, Great Lakes, and Aspen Music Festivals in the United States; the Miyazaki Chamber Music Festival in Japan; and the Verbier, Lucerne, and Bayreuth Festivals in Europe.

Yoonshin has earned many prestigious prizes throughout her career, including top prize awards in the Lipizer International Violin Competition in Italy; the Lipinski & Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poland; the Henry Marteau International Violin Competition in Germany; and first prize at the Stradivarius International Competition in the United States. She studied under the tutelage of Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory and continued her studies with Robert Mann and Glenn Dicterow at the Manhattan School of Music.

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.

Violinist Bing Wang joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Associate Concertmaster in 1994. She previously held the position of Principal Second Violin of the Cincinnati Symphony and has served on the faculty and as concertmaster at the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2003. Since 2009, she has also been Guest Concertmaster of her hometown orchestra, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, where her tenure was highlighted by a televised New Year’s concert conducted by Riccardo Muti. 

As a soloist, Wang has won critical praise for her appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In September 1997, during the Philharmonic’s celebration of the Brahms anniversary year, she performed the composer’s Double Concerto with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Hollywood Bowl. She made her Walt Disney Concert Hall concerto debut in May of 2005 and appears annually as both concertmaster and soloist at the Hollywood Bowl under the baton of composer John Williams, performing his signature movie classics such as Schindler’s List and his arrangement of Fiddler on the Roof. Wang has appeared regularly with the American Youth Symphony since 1997, and she has also been featured as a soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony, the Manhattan Symphony, and other orchestras. In 2002, she gave her first performances in China since emigrating to the U.S., touring as a soloist with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. 

Active as a chamber musician, Wang has collaborated with such distinguished artists as Lang Lang, Yefim Bronfman, Emanuel Ax, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, among others. Chamber music appearances include performances at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, Germany. She also performs regularly on the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella and Chamber Music series. 

Bing Wang began studying the violin with her parents at the age of six. She entered the middle school of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she was concertmaster of the school orchestra, and graduated with highest honors. After coming to the U.S. to study with Berl Senofsky at the Peabody Conservatory, she received her master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music under the tutelage of Glenn Dicterow. In 2012, Bing Wang was named an Adjunct Associate Professor at the USC Thornton School of Music. 

Hailed by The Guardian as “a cellist of power and grace” who possesses “mature artistry and willingness to go to the brink,” cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. His projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future. Woods is a recipient of the 2022 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

In the 2022-2023 season, Woods premieres a new version of his evening-length, multimedia tour de force Difficult Grace at 92Y, UCLA, and Chicago’s Harris Theater; curates and performs a program honoring the centennial of composer George Walker at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; premieres Freida Abtan’s My Heart is a River, commissioned by the Seattle Symphony; and performs a world premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir at Carnegie Hall as part of Claire Chase’s Density Series. The Great Northern Festival in Minneapolis will present Woods in his critically acclaimed performance installation, Iced Bodies, in which Woods, in a wetsuit, plays an obsidian ice cello.

Recital appearances this season include concerts with pianist Andrew Rosenblum at Dumbarton Oaks in D.C., Boston's Isabella Gardner Museum, and The Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills, and a return to his former home Brussels for a solo recital at Das Haus. He also tours to Washington Performing Arts, Krannert Center, Stanford Live, California Center for the Arts, Count Basie Center for the Arts, Auburn University, and Emory University with the Chad Lawson Trio. In addition, Woods will hold residencies at Montclair State University and Oberlin Conservatory. The season will also see the release of a new solo album on Cedille Records and the soundtrack of the PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust – a film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein – to which Woods contributed.

In addition to solo performances, he has appeared with the ICTUS Ensemble (Brussels, BE), Ensemble L’Arsenale (IT), zone Experimental (CH), Basel Sinfonietta (CH), Ensemble LPR, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Atlanta and Seattle Symphonies, and in chamber music with violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Andreas Haefliger. A fierce advocate for contemporary arts, Woods has collaborated and worked with a wide range of artists ranging from the likes of Louis Andriessen, Elliott Carter, Heinz Holliger, G. F. Haas, Helmut Lachenmann, Klaus Lang, and Peter Eötvos to Peter Gabriel, Sting, Lou Reed, Dame Shirley Bassey, and Rachael Yamagata to such visual artists as Ron Athey, Vanessa Beecroft, Jack Early, Adam Pendleton, and Aldo Tambellini. In the 2021-2022 season, he premiered concertos by Rebecca Saunders and Tyshawn Sorey.

In recent years, Woods has appeared in concert at the Royal Albert Hall – BBC Proms, Aspen Music Festival, Ojai Festival, Snape Maltings Festival, the Ghent Festival, Washington Performing Arts, Strathmore, Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Le Poisson Rougel, Cafe OTO, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klang Festival-Durham, INTER/ actions Symposium, ICMC-SMS Conference (Athens, GR), NIME-London, Sound and Body Festival, Instalakcje Festival, Virginia Tech, La Salle College (Singapore), and FINDARS (Malaysia), amongst others. Recent awards include a DCASE artist grant, Earle Brown/ Morton Feldman Foundation Grant, McGill University-CIRMMT/IDMIL Visiting Researcher Residency, Centre Intermondes Artist Residency, Francis Chagrin Award, Concours [Re]connaissance-Premiere Prix, and the Paul Sacher Stiftung Research Scholarship.

His debut solo album, asinglewordisnotenough (Confront Recordings-London), has garnered great acclaim since its release in November 2016 and has been profiled in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, The Guardian, 5against4, I Care If You Listen, Musical America, Seattle Times, and Strings Magazine, amongst others.

Woods recently joined the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California as Assistant Professor of Practice - Cello and Chamber Music. He previously served on the faculties of the University at Buffalo, University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, and the Chicago Academy of the Arts and as Artist in Residence at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and Northwestern University - Center for New Music. Woods holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, and a PhD from the University of Huddersfield. In the 2020-21 season, he was an Artist in Residence with the Kaufman Music Center, and from 2018-2020 he served as Artist in Residence with Seattle Symphony and Creative Consultant for the interactive concert hall, Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center.

Seth Parker Woods is a Pirastro Artist and endorses Pirastro Perpetual Strings worldwide.