Pianist Pei-Yao Wang has established herself as a prominent soloist and chamber musician. Her career has taken her to venues such as the Carnegie, Avery Fisher, Alice Tully, and Merkin Halls in New York City; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; Salle des Varietes in Monte Carlo; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with members of the Guarneri, Orion, Chicago, Mendelssohn, and Miro quartets; and has performed with artists such as Claude Frank, Hilary Hahn, David Shifrin, and Mitsuko Uchida. She is also regularly invited to perform at festivals, including Marlboro, Caramoor, Norfolk, La Jolla, Ravini, and Bridgehampton. Wang was a graduate of Chamber Music Society Two at Lincoln Center and a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists Program. Her teachers include Seymour Lipkin, Gary Graffman, Claude Frank, and Richard Goode.
This coming season renews his collaboration with the New Jersey Symphony and Neeme Järvi, performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1.
Susan Ward is an independent textile historian whose research focuses on 20th-century modernist textiles, design, and architecture; Scandinavian textiles and design; general textile, fashion, jewelry, and design history; Japanese textiles; and the history of retailing. She was a cocurator of the exhibition Knoll Textiles, 1945–2010 at the Bard Graduate Center.
Clarinetist Amy Zoloto is the acting bass clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic. As member of the Sylvan Winds she has performed in chamber music recitals around New York and broadcasts on classical music station WQXR. A former member of the Jacksonville Symphony, Zoloto has performed with the Philadelphia, Metropolitan, New York City Opera, Chicago Civic, and American Symphony orchestras. In addition to spending 10 summers at the Bard Music Festival, she has performed at the Colorado Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Valley, and Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. An advocate of new music, she recently gave the premiere performance and recording of Memphis Wood by composer Stella Sung.
Pianist Orion Weiss is one of the most sought-after soloists and collaborators in his generation of young American musicians. He has performed with, among others, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, and with New York Philharmonic at both Lincoln Center and Bravo! Vail Valley Festival. As a recitalist and chamber musician, Weiss has appeared at venues and festivals including Lincoln Center, Ravinia Festival, Sheldon Concert Hall, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Bard Music Festival, and Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. In 2009–10 he debuted a new trio, with Stefan Jackiw and David Requiro. He has received the Juilliard William Petschek Award, Gilmore Young Artist Award, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Calvin Wiersma has appeared as soloist with Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Concerto Company of Boston, and Lawrence Symphony, among others. A member of Manhattan String Quartet, he was a founding member of Meliora Quartet and Figaro Trio. He has been heard at the Aspen, Vancouver, Rockport, Bard, Portland, Crested Butte, and many other festivals. Wiersma is a member of Cygnus and the Lochrian Chamber Ensemble and also appears frequently with Speculum Musicae, Ensemble 21, Parnassus, Ensemble Sospeso, and New York New Music Ensemble. Recent recordings include Jacob Druckman’s Third String Quartet (Philomusica), Elliott Carter’s Syringa, Milton Babbitt’s Swan Song, Harold Meltzer’s Brion with the Cygnus Ensemble, and chamber music by Nils Vigeland and songs by Stephen Foster (with Paula Robison). He is assistant professor of violin and chamber music at Purchase Conservatory of Music. Richard Wilson is the composer of some one hundred works in many genres, including opera. His most recent CD, the eighth Albany Records disc devoted entirely to his music, is Brash Attacks. The winner of many awards including the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship, an Academy Award in Music, the Hinrichsen Award, and the Stoeger Prize, he has received commissions from the Koussevitzky, Fromm, and Naumburg Foundations as well as the San Francisco Symphony and Chicago Chamber Musicians. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College, Wilson studied composition with Robert Moevs at Harvard, in Rome, and at Rutgers University. Active as a pianist, he studied in Cleveland, Aspen, and New York City with Leonard Shure, and in Munich with Friedrich Wührer. Wilson holds the Mary Conover Mellon Chair in Music at Vassar College; he is also composer in residence with the American Symphony Orchestra. Alisa Wyrick is a native New Yorker and violinist with the New York City Opera Orchestra. She studied at Oberlin Conservatory, where she received bachelor’s degrees in violin and sociology. Prior to returning to New York, she was concertmaster of the South Bend Symphony and principal second in the Kenosha Symphony and quartet. She currently performs with a diverse group of ensembles, including the New Jersey Symphony and American Ballet Theatre orchestras, and has been a guest with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Eric Wyrick, concertmaster of the Bard Music Festival’s resident orchestra since its inception, has just finished his 12th season as concertmaster of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and has been a member/leader of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra since 1988.
74 BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL 2011
Chad Yarbrough has appeared with many of the world’s most prestigious musical organizations, such as L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony, American Symphony Orchestra, and New York City Opera. As a freelance horn player, he has performed with the Riverside Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Berkshire Bach Society, and Ensemble Sospeso, among others. He has worked with many esteemed conductors, including Kurt Masur, Michael Tilson Thomas, Charles Dutoit, Sir Colin Davis, Leon Botstein, and Zubin Mehta.
Violinist Carmit Zori came to the United States from Israel at 15 to study with Ivan Galamian, Jaime Laredo, and Arnold Steinhardt at the Curtis Institute of Music. The recipient of a Levintritt Foundation Award, a Pro Musicis International Award, and a top prize in the Naumburg International Violin Competition, she has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Rochester Philharmonic, and Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. She has performed as a recitalist at Lincoln Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. She has graced venues throughout Latin America and Europe, as well as in Israel, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia, where she premiered the Violin Concerto by Marc Neikrug. She was an artistic director and frequent performer at Bargemusic in New York, and is now the artistic director of Brooklyn Chamber Music Society. She has recorded on the Arabesque, Koch International, and Elektra-Nonesuch labels. Zori is professor of violin and chamber music faculty at SUNY Purchase. Founded in 1962 by legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, the American Symphony Orchestra continues its mission to demystify orchestral music, and make it accessible and affordable to everyone. Under music director Leon Botstein, the ASO has pioneered what the Wall Street Journal called “a new concept in orchestras,” presenting concerts curated around various themes drawn from the visual arts, literature, politics, and history, and unearthing rarely performed masterworks for well-deserved revival. These concerts are performed in the Vanguard Series at Carnegie Hall. The orchestra also performs in the celebrated concert series Classics Declassified at Peter Norton Symphony Space, and is the resident orchestra of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, where it appears in a winter subscription series as well as Bard’s annual SummerScape Festival and the Bard Music Festival. In 2010, the American Symphony became the resident orchestra of The Collegiate Chorale, performing regularly in the Chorale’s New York concert series. The orchestra has made several tours of Asia and Europe, and has performed in countless benefits for organizations including the Jerusalem Foundation and PBS. ASO’s award-winning music education program, Music Notes, integrates symphonic music into core humanities classes in high schools across the tri-state area. In addition to many albums released on the Telarc, New World, Bridge, Koch, and Vanguard labels, live performances by the American Symphony are now available for digital download. In many cases, these are the only existing recordings of some of the rare works that have been rediscovered in ASO performances.