YASMINA SPIEGELBERG, CLARINET

Swiss-French clarinetist Yasmina Spiegelberg is the laureate of several international and national competitions including the Rotary International Competition Madrid Velazquez, the Frances Walton Seattle Competition, and the USC Concerto Competition. Additionally, she was awarded the Special Prize at the 2nd Vienna International Music Competition, and the Golden Medal at the 4th Manhattan International Music Competition. Her clarinet trio, The Tandru Trio, was the winner at the Beverly Hills National Auditions in 2019. She is also a member of the preeminent woodwind quintet, ConnectFive, which has been heard across the Northeast, invited at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and is an Ensemble Forward Grantee through Chamber Music America.

Based in NYC, she is currently a fellow at Ensemble Connect, the resident ensemble of Carnegie Hall, which features extraordinary young musicians from around the globe who are committed to community engagement, teaching, entrepreneurship, and leadership. She has appeared in many renowned concert halls including the Oslo Concert Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Carnegie Hall.

Yasmina is a guest soloist with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the Nomad Symphony Orchestra (France) and the String Ensemble Rapsodia (Switzerland) and collaborates with conductors such as Stefan Asbury, David Lockington, Franck Ollu, Lior Shambadal, and Paul Watkins. Her chamber music collaborations include Peter Frankl, Clive Greensmith, Thomas Guei, Peter Kolkay, Cynthia Phelps, Hila Plitmann, Mark Steinberg, and Roger Tapping. A passionate advocate of contemporary classical music, she collaborates with composers Kalevi Aho, Reena Esmail, Inti Figgis-Vizueta, Liza Lim, James MacMillan, and Steve Reich.

She is also very active in the Los Angeles music scene, performing in some of the finest concert series including Dilijan, Classical Sundays at Six, LACMA Sunday’s Live, and Music In The Mansion. In recent years, Yasmina has appeared at world-famous festivals such as Yellowbarn (USA), where she has also been a Residency Artist, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival (USA), Festival POTE (France), and the International Ensemble Modern Academy (Austria). Furthermore, she is broadcasted live as a soloist on KUSC (California) and KING-FM (Washington) and she recorded an album in Switzerland featuring concertos and other works for clarinet and orchestra.

As part of a cultural exchange between Norway and Côte d’Ivoire, Yasmina traveled with Barth Niava, director of Oslo’s African Culture Institute (CAK), to Addah, Côte d’Ivoire, to learn several traditional songs from the village. In celebration of the CAK’s 40th Anniversary, she premiered Pierre Thilloy’s Le Chant des Lagunes, a quadruple concerto for violin, clarinet, bassoon, djembe, and orchestra, which took inspiration from the same traditional songs.

An experienced educator, Yasmina has taught at The Santa Monica Conservatory, Musique & Son in Switzerland, and has been a faculty member for the Young Artist Program at Yellowbarn where she has taught chamber music and clarinet. She has an experience encompassing more than fifteen years of teaching clarinet to students of all ages. As part of her Fellowship with Ensemble Connect, she is a teaching artist in residence at Robert F. Wagner Middle School in New York City.

She holds a Bachelor’s from the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (The Netherlands), as well as a Master in Performance from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo with Björn Nyman. She also earned a Graduate Certificate and an Artist Diploma from the University of Southern California with world-famous Professor Yehuda Gilad.

yasminaspiegelberg.com

Jennifer Liu, violin

Passionate young violinist Jennifer Liu has performed extensively throughout the United States as a soloist and chamber musician, including at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in Los Angeles, California, Jennifer moved to New York at age 15 to study with Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho at the Juilliard School. Currently, Ms. Liu is a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship at the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Sylvia Rosenberg and Donald Weilerstein.

A prize winner at the Alice and Eleanore Schoenfield Competition, Jennifer has received scholarships and awards from the Starling Foundation, the Young Musicians Foundation, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and has soloed with the Young Musicians Foundation under Maestro Case Scaglione and the New West Symphony under Boris Brott.

Jennifer Liu plays on a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini on generous loan from the Juilliard Rare Instrument Collection. Beyond the stage, Ms. Liu dedicates her weekends by sharing her passion for classical music at psychiatric hospitals around New York City as a Gluck Community Fellow.

jenniferliuviolin.com

Halam Kim, viola

Halam Kim, 25, is a violist who shows versatility in all areas of solo, chamber, and orchestral music.

As a soloist, her select accomplishments include her performance of Walton’s Viola Concerto with the Eastman Philharmonia at Kodak Hall and with the Baden-Baden Philharmonic Orchestra and solo appearances at Carnegie Hall. She is a grand prize winner of the Wagner Young Musicians Competition in New York and a laureate of the Golden Key International Music, American Protégé International Competition, New York Music Competition, and the New Praise Support Society.

As a chamber musician, she was a founding member of the Capra Quartet, which was chosen for Intensive Seminar and Honors List at Eastman and spent the summer of 2018 at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. With a different quartet, Halam was invited to perform at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. At the Sarasota Music Festival, Kim had the privilege to play with faculty members Zachary DePue and Natalie Helm. She also participated in Juilliard’s ChamberFest where she had the privilege to intensively work with Robert Levin as a coach.

As an orchestral player, she took part in the world premiere of Kevin Puts’ Letters from Georgia with soprano Renée Fleming and the Eastman Philharmonia. She is currently a member of the Glens Falls Symphony, Symphony in C, and the Juilliard Orchestra, where she has been selected to be in the principal pool. She has worked under the batons of Alan Gilbert, Peter Oundjian, David Robertson, Evan Rogister, and Gerard Schwartz.

Ms. Kim is from Port Washington, NY, and she holds a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music with the highly selective Performer’s Certificate, and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of Rochester. Kim is currently pursuing her Master of Music at The Juilliard School. In the fall of 2019, she will be attending the New England Conservatory, pursuing a Graduate Diploma under the tutelage of Kim Kashkashian. Her past teachers include I-Hao Lee, Carol Rodland, and Phillip Ying.

Laura Andrade, cello

Texas native Laura Andrade is a Latina cellist who calls Austin home. She enjoys a diverse musical career as a solo, orchestra, and chamber musician. Laura is a prize-winning laureate of the 2019 Sphinx Competition and has been featured as a soloist with the Austin Civic Orchestra and San Antonio Symphony under the baton of maestro Ken-David Masur.

Laura has a passionate love and curiosity for chamber music. In the past, she has collaborated with members of the Juilliard, Borromeo, and Miró string quartets. She has performed at IMS Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music, Verbier Festival, and Accademia Isola Classica.

In 2019, Laura joined the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra as its inaugural Colton Fellow. She holds a bachelor’s degree and performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music, and a master’s degree from The Juilliard School. Her core cello mentors include Amy Levine-Tsang, Steven Doane, Rosemary Elliott, and Natasha Brofsky. As part of her fellowship with Ensemble Connect, Laura teaches at City College Academy of the Arts in Manhattan.

More about Laura

Seth boustead

Seth Boustead is a composer, radio host, arts manager and writer, concert producer, in-demand speaker and visionary with the goal of revolutionizing how and where classical music is performed and how it is perceived by the general public.  He received his Master of Music Composition degree from the Chicago College for the Performing Arts in 2002 and has gone on to forge a unique and highly personal musical identity through a prolific outpouring of works in every conceivable genre. His music is regularly performed across the United States and in Europe and has been heard on radio and television stations in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Paris among others.

In 2017 Seth’s piano concerto was premiered to acclaim by the Chicago Composers Orchestra with Marta Aznavoorian as soloist and his piece Group Dance was recently aired on Performance Today, the country’s most-heard syndicated classical music radio program. He is currently working on a sprawling chamber piece inspired by the 1960’s art movement the Hairy Who to be performed later this year as part of Art Design Chicago.  The New York Times called Seth’s music “lyrical and full of whimsy” while the A/V club said “Boustead has a penchant for writing dark, angsty scores.”

Seth is the founder and Executive Director of Access Contemporary Music, an organization that exists to present classical music as a living art form by performing new works in innovative ways for new audiences, providing community-based music education focused on creativity, and commissioning projects with composers from around the world.  ACM began when Seth started the now-legendary Weekly Readings program in which he and other musicians met every week to read through, record and post pieces by living composers every week. Weekly Readings ran for six years and attracted major press including the NewMusicBox, Chamber Music Today and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Seth currently lives in Brooklyn.  More information about Seth can be found at sethboustead.com

narragansett bay symphony

NaBSCO was founded as the Rhode Island Philharmonic Community Orchestra (RIPCO) in 2006. Our founding Music Director, John Eells, worked with interested Providence-area musicians and gained support from the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra & Music School to create an all-volunteer orchestra for adults who love to play symphonic music at a high level of musicianship.

In 2013, as John prepared to move to California, we began our transition to an independent nonprofit organization with our new name, Narragansett Bay Symphony Community Orchestra.

Many of our members—including some of our Board members—have been with us since RIPCO’s premiere performance, while others are in their first season with us. NaBSCO members include professional freelance musicians and others who work in a variety of fields. We live in almost every town and city in Rhode Island (as well as several of our MA and CT neighbors). Our current Music Director, Kristo Kondakçi, formally joined our team in June 2020.

nabsco.org

STEPHANIE ANN BOYD, COMPOSER

Michigan-born, Manhattan-based American composer Stephanie Ann Boyd (b. 1990) writes melodic music about women’s memoirs and the natural world for symphonic and chamber ensembles. Her work has been performed in nearly all 50 states and has been commissioned by musicians and organizations in 37 countries. Boyd’s five ballets include works choreographed by New York City Ballet principal dancers Lauren Lovette, Ashley Bouder, NYCB soloist Peter Walker, and XAOC Contemporary Ballet’s Eryn Renee Young.  Eero, a ballet commissioned by Access Contemporary Music and Open House New York, was written for the grand opening of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. Her music has been praised as “attractive lyricism” (Gramophone), “[with] ethereal dissonances” (Boston Globe), “[music that] didn’t let itself be eclipsed” (Texas Classical Review), “arrestingly poetic” (BMOP), and “wide ranging, imaginative” (Portland Press Herald).

Boyd’s music has been commissioned and performed by concertmasters of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, the Des Moines Symphony, the Faroe Islands Symphony, the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, the Fort Smith Symphony, the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, and principal players in the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.  Her music has been commissioned and/or played by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the New England Conservatory Philharmonic, the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, the New York Jazzharmonic, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Roosevelt University Orchestra, the Eureka Ensemble, the JVL Festival Orchestra, the Texas State University Symphony, the Cremona International Academy Orchestra, the UW La Crosse Symphony, the Detroit Civic Orchestra, and the El Paso Youth Symphony. Her work has been presented by the Thalia and her Sisters concert series, the Moirae Ensemble, and Sandcastle New Music in New York City; Æpex Contemporary Music in Michigan; Juventas New Music, Collage New Music, and the New Gallery Concert Series in Boston; Cincinnati Soundbox, and others. Stephanie has worked with conductors such as Andrew Litton, Lina Gonzales, Earl Lee, Nathan Aspinall, Cliff Colnot, Gill Rose, Julian Benichou, Kristo Kondakci, and Kevin Fitzgerald.

The 2020/2021 season includes commissions from the Wyoming Symphony, Astral Artists with cellist Tommy Mesa, violinist Megan Healy, pianists Lara Downes, Lise de la Salle, Marta Aznavoorian, Lucille Chung, Susie Maddocks, Adrienne Park, Diane Kaztenburg Braun and Music Street, Sarah Bob and the New Gallery Concert Series, Holly Roadfeldt, Marianne Parker, Eunbi Kim, the Kurganov-Finehouse Duo, and others. This season also includes performances by the Lincoln Trio, Juventas New Music, Jennifer Reason, Lisa Pegher, Shouthouse, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, including concerts at the Kaufman Center, the Boston New Music Festival, the Festival of New American Music, Pianoforte in Chicago, live on Chicago’s WFMT radio station, and elsewhere.

Stephanie holds degrees from Roosevelt University and New England Conservatory, and she was one of the last violin students of renowned pedagogue John Kendall.

http://stephanieannboyd.com