PhoenixPhest! Faculty

Violin

Gabriel Bolkosky is the executive director and founding member of The Phoenix Ensemble. Through this organization and other projects, he has worked with great composers such as William Bolcom, John Harbison, Thomas Ades, George Tsontakis, Bernard Rands, Sydney Hodkinson, Derek Bermel, Ned McGowan and Christopher Rouse.

At the University of Michigan, Gabe studied violin with Paul Kantor, and jazz with Ellen Rowe and Ed Sarath. He also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music under Donald Weilerstein. Gabe maintains a strong interest across many musical genres and regularly performs in both classical and improvised settings.

Over the past decade, Gabe has devoted much of his time to working with young people. He has worked with thousands of students, teaching violin and improvisation. He has served as guest artist at many workshops and schools around the country including Harvard, Brandeis, Dartmouth, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Walden School and the Aspen Music Festival, where he played in the Contemporary Ensemble. He will be teaching violin at the University of Michigan in 2009-10. For more information, see his web site: www.gabrielbolkosky.com.

Violinist Alicia Doudna has performed and taught throughout the U.S. and abroad. She has performed with Itzhak Perlman, Paul Katz, Ronald Copes and members of the Cavani Quartet. As a chamber musician she has appeared at various festivals including Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall, The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and the Festival de Musique de Chamber du Larzac in France. She has also performed with various chamber orchestras and ensembles, including The East Coast Chamber Orchestra, The Suedama Ensemble, Radius Ensemble, and The Phoenix Ensemble. She is a member the Phoenix Quartet, artists-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

Ms. Doudna was previously the director of the Peninsula Strings in Blue Hill, Maine, and an assistant to Merry Peckham at the Perlman Music Program in New York. She has also served on the faculty of the Sphinx Preparatory Program in Detroit and has given guest artist master classes at the Chamber Music Connection in Columbus, Ohio, and at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She currently teaches a private studio in Ann Arbor of over twenty students, ranging in age from four to eighteen. Her principal teachers included Lucy Stoltzman, David Updegraff, Mimi Zweig and Suzuki pioneer John Kendall. She holds a BM from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a MM from The New England Conservatory.

Scott Esty lives and teaches in Oregon, where he performs with the Oregon Symphony and the Portland Opera Orchestra and directs a teaching studio of 20 young violinists. Scott has performed across the country with some of today’s finest musicians, including the Shanghai String Quartet and pianists Brian Ganz, Adam Neiman, and Audrey Andrist. As violinist with the Portland-based modern ensemble Fear No Music, Scott premiered and recorded music by a wide range of contemporary composers, and gained the distinction of being one of the few violinists to perform upside down. Prior to moving to Oregon, Scott was Associate Concertmaster of the Kalamazoo Symphony. As a member of the KSO’s resident String Quartet, he appeared in regular concerts on the KSO concert series as well as touring area schools, community centers, and prisons with educational lecture/concert presentations of his own design. Scott has taught at Suzuki Institutes across the country, but PhoenixPhest is his favorite.

Annie Fullard is a founding member of the Cavani String Quartet, which is a winner of numerous awards and prizes including the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, Cleveland Quartet Competition and the Banff, Fischoff and Carmel competitions. Ms. Fullard and her colleagues in The Cavani Quartet were named Musical America’s Young Artists of the Year 1989 and received the 1998 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, the 2005 Guarneri String Quartet Residency Award and four Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Grants. Ms. Fullard has toured extensively throughout the United States and abroad, including a Mozart 2006 tour of Salzburg, Vienna, and Prague. Other appearances include Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Corcoran Gallery and Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Ambassador Series in Los Angeles, Festival L’Epau in France, and the Ijsbreker Series in Amsterdam. Deeply committed to arts education, Ms. Fullard has given master classes and lecture demonstrations at music festivals, universities and public and private schools in communities across the country. As member of the faculty and Quartet-in-Residence at The Cleveland Institute of Music since 1988, Ms. Fullard in collaboration with her colleagues has developed the Apprentice Program, Intensive Quartet Seminar, New Quartet Project and M.A.P. (Music, Art & Poetry) PROJECT. Ms. Fullard is former artist-in-residence at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Texas and is currently visiting artist at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Ms. Fullard pursued additional studies at the Indiana University and Yale University. Her teachers and mentors include Donald Weilerstein, Josef Gingold, Franco Gulli, Earl Carlyss and Peter Salaff. A resident of Cleveland, Ms. Fullard has a son named Sam, a cat named Music, and four fish.

Andrew Jennings’s principal teachers were Ivan Galamian, Alexander Schneider, Pamela Gearhart and Raphael Druian. He was a founding member of the Concord String Quartet, a new ensemble that quickly gained international recognition by winning the Naumberg Chamber Music Award in 1972 and which performed more than 1200 concerts throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Specializing in the performance of new works (with an emphasis on American composers), this Quartet gave more than 50 premieres and commissions; it also performed the standard repertory and 32 cycles of the complete Beethoven quartets and made numerous recordings, three of which were nominated for Grammy Awards. Mr. Jennings maintained his association with this Quartet until it disbanded in 1987. The Concord Trio, which Mr. Jennings subsequently formed with Norman Fischer and Jeanne Kierman, debuted in 1993.
Mr. Jennings’ teaching career began at Dartmouth College where members of the Concord Quartet were engaged as artists-in-residence from 1974 to 1987. Later he served on the faculty of Oberlin College. He currently devotes his summers to chamber music instruction at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, where he holds the Beatrice Proctor Master Teacher Chair, and to the Musicorda School for Strings in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His recordings can be found on RCA, Nonesuch, Vox, Turnabout, Equilibrium, Danacord and MMO.

Peter Salaff was a founding member and second violinist of the Cleveland Quartet, which received a Grammy, seven Grammy nominations and “Best of the Year” awards from Time and Stereo Review for recordings of more than 50 chamber works. They also performed and toured the former Soviet Union, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, and Israel, in addition to U.S. and Canadian tours. Mr. Salaff has served on the faculty at the University of Concepcion (Chile), Cleveland Institute of Music, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Eastman School of Music. He has also taught at Interlochen, Chamber Music in the Mountain at Echo Glen, Aspen Music Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany, among others.

He has been a judge at many chamber music competitions, including the Yellow Springs Competition, the London International String Quartet Competition, the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, and the Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition. Ensembles coached by Mr. Salaff have garnered prestigious international awards, including the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation Chamber Music Award, Banff International String Quartet Competition, Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition, and Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, among others. These ensembles include the Anderson, Cavani, Chester, Colorado, Dakota, Franciscan, Lafayette, Lark, Lydian, Meliora, Rackham, and Ying Quartets.

Mr. Salaff was reappointed to the Cleveland Institute of Music faculty in September 1995 as director of string chamber music. He has also been a faculty member of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, since 1996.

A native of Ontario, Canada, Mari Sato joined the Cavani String Quartet in 1995. Ms. Sato received her Bachelor of Music degree with distinction from the Cleveland Institute of Music and pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan. Her major teachers and mentors include Richard Lawrence, Ralph Aldrich, Julia Bushkova, David Cerone, David Updegraff, Paul Kantor, and Peter Salaff.

She is currently on the chamber music faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In her spare time, Ms. Sato enjoys cooking, jogging, and spending time with her husband and two children in Shaker Heights.

Viola

Stephanie Fong is a native of Oakland, California, where she began her musical studies at the age of seven. She holds degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory. Her principal teachers include Martha Strongin Katz and Ian Swensen.

In addition to attending numerous festivals including the Aspen Music School and Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Yellow Barn Music School and Festival, and Kneisel Hall, Ms. Fong has performed extensively as a chamber musician with artists such as Gilbert Kalish, Robert Mann, Menahem Pressler, and Donald Weilerstein, among others.

Ms. Fong was named a Presser Scholar in 2000 and an award winner at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in 2006. She is currently freelancing in the Greater Boston area performs regularly the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Indian Hill Symphony Orchestra, and Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Cello

A native of Detroit, Miriam Bolkosky began her cello studies at the age of four and made her solo debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at fifteen. Ms. Bolkosky has performed extensively with the Boston Pops, National Lyric Opera, Berkshire Opera, New York City Opera National Company, Music of the Baroque, Chicago Lyric Opera, and Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra as well as with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Ravinia Festival Orchestra, and Chicago’s Symphony II. The Washington Post applauded her performance as soloist at the John F. Kennedy Center as one filled with a “poignant beauty born of pathos.” Her recording of Donald McCullough’s “Holocaust Cantata” can be heard on Albany Records. An active chamber musician, she has given numerous recitals including performances at Paul Hall, Harris Hall, the Cape May Festival, the Cayman International Chamber Music Festival, Avery Fisher Hall, Weill Recital Hall, and Carnegie Hall. She is a member of the Ann Arbor based Phoenix and Cassini Ensembles, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio, as well as Boston’s Radius Ensemble. She holds degrees from The University of Michigan and The Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Jeffrey Solow, Erling Blondal Bengtsson, and Alan Harris.

Ms. Bolkosky has served on the faculties of Northwestern University, the Music Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Montclair University, and the Suzuki School of Newton. She currently freelances and teaches in Boston.

Melissa Kraut was appointed to the faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music in the fall of 2006. Prior to that appointment, she was Associate Professor of Cello at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL.

Dr. Kraut has performed all over the world, including concerts in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Canada, France and throughout the United States. She has played under the baton of conductors such as Sir Georg Solti, Valery Gergiev and Semyon Bychkov, and has participated in many music festivals, including the Aspen Music Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and a summer at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Dr. Kraut plays with the Orlando Philharmonic, the Jacksonville Symphony, and the Winter Park Bach Festival Orchestra. Recent recitals have been in Delaware, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee.
In addition to teaching at UCF, Dr. Kraut is Educational/Artistic Director for A Gift for Music- a string program that provides free instruments and instruction to 900 inner city children in Orlando.

Dr. Kraut was on the summer faculty at the Interlochen Center for the Arts for 9 summers and served as the Area Coordinator for Strings for 2 years. During the 2005-6 school year she was instructor of Cello at the Interlochen Arts Academy.

Dr. Kraut holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Iowa and Northwestern University. Dr. Kraut’s principal instructors were Alan Harris and Hans Jorgen-Jensen. In addition, she has performed in master classes for such cellists as Yo-Yo Ma, Aldo Parisot, Tsuyoshi Tsitsumi, David Soyer and Frank Miller.

Cellist Mary Ann Ramos has appeared as soloist with several orchestras, including the Gateway Festival Orchestra, the University City Symphony, the Alton Symphony, and the Kirkwood Symphony. She holds prizes in various competitions, among them the Mexican National Cello Competition and the Music Teachers National Association. Ms. Ramos is the cellist of the Phoenix Quartet, which resides, teaches, and performs in Ann Arbor, MI, as core members of the non-profit arts organization, The Phoenix Ensemble. She has performed at festivals nationally and internationally, including SummerMusic Chamber Music Festivel (Iowa), Kneisel Hall (Maine), Festival du Chambre du Larzac (France), and Festival Artistico Coahuila (Mexico). As a chamber music coach, she has taught at festivals such as PhoenixPhest!, Insbrook Institute, Rocky Mountain Summer Conservatory, and the Kneisel Hall Young Musicians Program. Mary Ann has also been involved in the Sphinx organization for a number of years, as a semi-finalist, as a member of the Sphinx Symphony, and in the Sphinx Laureates Concert at Carnegie Hall. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at the New England Conservatory as a student of Laurence Lesser, her Master’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music, as a student of Richard Aaron, and her Doctorate at the University of Michigan, as a student of Anthony Elliott.

Derek Snyder has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in the United States and Europe, and has collaborated as a chamber musician with members of some of the country’s most exciting ensembles, including the Cavani and Cleveland string quartets, the Cleveland Orchestra, and Detroit, Montreal and Baltimore Symphonies. He is a founding member of The Phoenix Ensemble and cellist in the tango band Oblivion Project, which explores the music of Astor Piazzolla. In 2003, his arrangements of the music of Graham Nash were performed by the Contemporary Youth Orchestra with the composer. He has created numerous transcriptions and arrangements for cello ensembles, focusing primarily on the music of jazz great Dave Brubeck and nuevo tango master Astor Piazzolla. His arrangements of music by Brubeck (as preformed by the Yale Cellos) can be heard on the Naxos label.

Derek’s principal teachers have been Tanya Carey, Erling Blondal Bengtsson, Laurence Lesser, and Colin Carr. He is the founder and education director of The Cleveland Cello School. For more about Derek, see www.cellocelli.com.

Bass

Diana Gannett, chair of strings and professor of double bass at the University of Michigan, specializes in double bass. She has spent most of her professional life on the East Coast as teacher and performer. As a chamber musician, she has performed with the artists of the Guarneri, Emerson, Laurentian, and Stanford Quartets and the Borodin Trio, as well as the Iowa Center for New Music, American Chamber Players, New Band, and the Oberlin Dance Collective. As a soloist, her programs have included over twenty contemporary premieres and several solo improvisations, as well as traditional repertoire. She is recorded on Irida records, has a solo CD titled Ladybass and a duo CD, Duetti Dolce. Previous appointments include the faculties of Yale University School of Music, Theatre & Dance and Hartt School of Music, Theatre & Dance in Connecticut, Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio, University of Iowa School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and the University of South Florida. For many years she held the position of principal double bass at Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her students have been winners in many solo competitions (ISB, ASTA, EMF, Aspen, and various regional competitions) and have also won positions in many fine professional orchestras and teaching institutions.

Piano

Hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” by the Boston Globe, pianist Sarah Bob is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. A strong advocate for new music and considered a “trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process…” (Northeast Performer), she is also the founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series devoted to commissioning and uniting new music and contemporary visual art with their creators. She is an original member of many ensembles including her piano/percussion group, Primary Duo, the 20th and 21st century focused Firebird Ensemble, and Radius Ensemble, a fresh and creative chamber music collective that presents both the traditional and cutting edge. Recognized as a risk taker and cited for an “ideal combination of all-stops-out abandon and sure-footed technical control” by 21st Century Music, she is a grant recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music and top prizewinner of the International Gaudeamus Competition 2001. She is also the recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s 2005 Grant-in-Aid Award, an honor that recognizes the quality of her work and artistic merit and received the first annual John Kleshinski Award in honor of her daring, exciting and high quality New Gallery Concert Series presentations. Sarah resides in Boston and can be heard playing the music of Lee Hyla on the Tzadik label, Curtis K. Hughes on Cauchemar Records solo piano by Lior Navok on NLM Records and collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on New World and Oxingale Records. This May, Sarah will receive the Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music and continue with current recording projects including the upcoming CD release of music by Elena Ruehr on Albany Records in May 2009, chamber music by Eric Moe as well as solo music by Lisa Bielawa both under the BMOP/sound label, and the music of Lee Hyla, Curtis K. Hughes, and Tamar Diesendruck with the Firebird Ensemble. For more information, please go to www.sarahbob.net.

Wind instruments

A former member of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra and of the Chicago Symphony, Benjamin Wright is second trumpet in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he holds the Arthur and Linda Gelb Chair. He joined the Boston Symphony trumpet section in July 2002. While a student in Cleveland, Wright won the International Trumpet Guild and National Trumpet Competitions, as well as the Cleveland Institute of Music Concerto Competition, and was awarded the Bernard Adelstein Prize for trumpet performance upon graduating. Mr. Wright has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. In 2006, he performed as guest principal trumpet with the San Francisco Symphony, including performances of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Beginning in fall 2006, he is assistant principal trumpet of the Boston Pops. He has given master classes at the Manhattan School of Music and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and has been a guest faculty member for the Bar Harbor Brass and the National Orchestral Institute. He is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, the Longy School of Music, and the Boston Conservatory.