Strings

  • A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, violinist Sunghae Anna Lim has a varied career as both performer and teacher. She is a new member of the Manhattan String Quartet, resident quartet at Colgate University. A keen advocate for new music, Ms. Lim is also the violinist of the New Millennium Ensemble, winner of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, and a frequent guest of groups such as Talea Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble and Da Capo Chamber Players. Ms. Lim was a founding member of the Laurel Piano Trio, winner of the Concert Artists Guild competition and resident ensemble at the Tanglewood Music Festival. The trio toured throughout the US and Central America and had its own program on WQXR, radio station of the New York Times. Ms. Lim also organizes and plays in the Richardson Chamber Players, a resident ensemble at Princeton University.

    Ms. Lim has recorded the music of Anton von Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Morton Feldman, William Grant Still, David del Tredici, Fausto Romitelli, Enno Pope, Dan Trueman and many emerging young composers. Her performances can be heard on the Bridge, CRI, Koch and Naxos labels. Regular music festival appearances include the Portland Chamber Music Festival, Maine Chamber Music Seminar, Open Chamber Music at Prussia Cove, the Weekend of Chamber Music, White Mountains Music Festival and the Wellesley Composers Conference.

    As a teacher of violin and chamber music, Ms. Lim has been on the faculty of Princeton University since 2000. She is interested in diverse pedagogical approaches to violin playing in the United States and Europe from Bach’s time to the present. Her teaching is informed by the ideas of the legendary violin pedagogue, Constantin Dounis, as well as the movement studies of Moshe Feldenkrais. Having worked with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Salzburg, she is particularly interested in the intersection of early music practices and the performance of later styles.

    Ms. Lim believes in music as a way of lifting up children of all races and backgrounds. She has worked with several El Sistema-inspired programs, most recently in the Trenton NJ area. She is a faculty advisor for Trenton Arts at Princeton, a student-run organization that develops educational and artistic ties between Princeton University and Trenton. She also serves on the advisory board of the Trenton Music Makers. In that capacity, she moderated a discussion with Gustavo Dudamel at the 2019 “Seminario” at Princeton University, which brought together hundreds of students from El Sistema-inspired programs throughout the Northeast. She was named a Dudamel Foundation Mentor in 2020 for her work on virtual teaching practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    After receiving a BA from Harvard University in History and Literature, Ms. Lim was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany. She subsequently completed her Diplom in violin performance at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Her teachers and mentors include Sandor Vegh (Vegh Quartet), Louis Krasner, Gerhard Schulz (Alban Berg Quartet), Ernst Kovacic, Daniel Phillips (Orion Quartet), and Byron Duckwall. She holds a DMA from Rutgers University, where she studied with Arnold Steinhardt (Guarneri Quartet).

  • Violist Jessica Thompson is a passionate chamber musician who performs regularly throughout the United States and abroad as a member of the Daedalus Quartet. The quartet, Grand Prize winner of the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition and resident quartet at Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two from 2005-07, is currently in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. As a member of Daedalus, Ms. Thompson has premiered works by such composers as Fred Lerdahl, Joan Tower, Richard Wernick, and Vivian Fung. Ms. Thompson has also toured with Musicians from Marlboro and has performed at numerous festivals, including the Portland Chamber Music Festival, the Halcyon Music Festival (Portsmouth, NH), the Newport Music Festival, and the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival. She performs often as a member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra.

    Ms. Thompson has appeared as a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra and in recitals in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC. She currently teaches at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Karen Tuttle.

  • Two-time Grammy-nominated violinist Jesse Mills enjoys performing music of many genres, from classical to contemporary, as well as composed and improvised music of his own invention.

    Since his concerto debut at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Mr. Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has been a soloist with the Phoenix Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Green Bay Symphony, Juilliard Chamber Orchestra, the Denver Philharmonic, the Teatro Argentino Orchestra (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), and the Aspen Music Festival's Sinfonia Orchestra.

    As a chamber musician, Jesse Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including concerts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Boston's Gardener Museum, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also appeared at prestigious venues in Europe, such as the Barbican Centre of London, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre, Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Mills is co-founder of Horszowski Trio and Duo Prism, a violin-piano duo with Rieko Aizawa, which earned 1st Prize at the Zinetti International Competition in Italy in 2006. With Ms. Aizawa, Mills became co-artistic director of the Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival in Colorado in 2010.

    Mills is also known as a pioneer of contemporary works, a renowned improvisational artist, as well as a composer. He earned Grammy nominations for his performances of Arnold Schoenberg's music, released by NAXOS in 2005 and 2010. He can also be heard on the Koch, Centaur, Tzadik, Max Jazz and Verve labels for various compositions of Webern, Schoenberg, Zorn, Wuorinen, and others. As a member of the FLUX Quartet from 2001-2003, Mills performed music composed during the last 50 years, in addition to frequent world premieres. As a composer and arranger, Mills has been commissioned by venues including Columbia University’s Miller Theater, the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, OR, and the Bargemusic in NYC.

    Jesse Mills began violin studies at the age of three. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in 2001. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Robert Mann, and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Mills lives in New York City, and he is on the faculty at Bard College and Brooklyn College. In 2010 the Third Street Music School Settlement in NYC honored him with the ‘Rising Star Award’ for musical achievement.

  • Cellist Clancy Newman has enjoyed an extraordinarily wide-ranging career, not only as a cellist, but also as a composer, producer, writer, and guest lecturer. He received his first significant public recognition at the age of twelve, when he won a Gold Medal at the Dandenong Youth Festival in Australia, competing against contestants twice his age. He went on to win first prize at the Naumburg International Competition, and he has performed as soloist throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. A recipient of an Avery Fisher career grant, he can often be heard on NPR’s “Performance Today” and has been featured on A&E and PBS. As a composer, he has expanded cello technique in ways heretofore thought unimaginable, particularly in his "Pop-Unpopped" project, and he has been featured on series by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Chicago Chamber Musicians. In March 2019 his piano quintet was premiered at the opening ceremony of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC, and in 2021 he was commissioned by the Kingston Chamber Music Festival to produce four educational videos to assist school teachers as they navigate the covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Newman is a graduate of the five-year exchange program between Juilliard and Columbia University, receiving a M.M. from Juilliard and a B.A. in English from Columbia.

Winds

  • Oboist Jacqueline Leclair is Associate Professor of Oboe at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She is a member of Ensemble Signal, and can frequently be heard performing solo and chamber music concerts internationally. Dr. Leclair was on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music (NYC) and was Assistant Professor of Oboe at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) from 2007 to 2012. During her last two years at BGSU she also served as the Director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music.Oboist Jacqueline Leclair is Associate Professor of Oboe at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She is a member of Ensemble Signal, and can frequently be heard performing solo and chamber music concerts internationally. Dr. Leclair was on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music (NYC) and was Assistant Professor of Oboe at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) from 2007 to 2012. During her last two years at BGSU she also served as the Director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music.

    Summer festivals for which Dr. Leclair has served as faculty and/or performer include the Lincoln Center Festival (NYC), Chamber Music Conference at Bennington College (VT), June In Buffalo (NY), Chamber Music Festival of Aguascalientes (Mexico), East/West Festival (Kazan, Tatarstan) and the Maine Chamber Music Seminar (ME), among others.

    In addition to performing a variety of classical and other musics, Dr. Leclair specializes in the study and performance of new music. She has premiered many works, and regularly presents classes in contemporary music and its techniques at schools such as UCLA, the Eastman School of Music, Brigham Young University, The North Carolina School for the Arts and University of California San Diego.

    Dr. Leclair has recorded for Nonesuch, CRI, Koch, Neuma, Deutsche Grammophon and CBS Masterworks, receiving critical acclaim in particular for her premiere recording of Roger Reynolds' Summer Island. Luciano Berio's Sequenza VIIa Supplementary Edition by Jacqueline Leclair is published by Universal Edition, Vienna, and Dr. Leclair's recording of the piece is on the Mode Records collection of all Berio Sequenze and other solo works.

    The New York Times has reviewed Dr. Leclair's performances as "astonishing" and as having "electrifying agility"; and the New Yorker has referred to her as "lively" and "wonderful." Dr. Leclair studied with Richard Killmer and Ronald Roseman at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester and SUNY Stony Brook, earning a Bachelor of Music, Performer's Certificate, Master’s Degree and Doctor of Musical Arts.

  • FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

    Clarinetist Jo-Ann Sternberg leads a diverse musical life in the New York area as a chamber musician, orchestral player, music educator, and interpreter of new music. A member of Borealis Wind Quintet, Sequitur, the Saratoga Chamber Players, Wind Soloists of New York, the Richardson Chamber Players and the Riverside Symphony, she also regularly performs with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the American Symphony, Mark Morris Dance, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Musicians from Marlboro, and can often be heard playing in a number of different Broadway musicals.

    Following her undergraduate years in the combined Tufts University/New England Conservatory dual degree program where she was mentored by Peter Hadcock, Ms. Sternberg continued her studies at Yale University with David Shifrin and at The Juilliard School with Charles Neidich.

    Currently, Ms. Sternberg serves on the faculties of the Princeton University Music Performance Program, Rutgers Mason Gross School of Music, the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music PreCollege, as well as maintaining an active teaching studio from her New York home. Additionally, she serves as a mentor in Juilliard’s Mentoring Program and coaches chamber ensembles for the New York Youth Symphony. In the summer months, Ms. Sternberg lives in Maine where she is the founder and artistic director of The Maine Chamber Music Seminar, teaches and performs at the Chamber Music Conference & Composers’ Forum of the East at Bennington College, and participates in numerous performance residencies throughout greater New England. Ms. Sternberg is a Selmer Artist residing in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

Piano

  • Praised by the NY Times for an “impressive musicality, a crisp touch and expressive phrasing”, Japanese pianist Rieko Aizawa has performed throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe, including New York City’s Lincoln Center, Boston's Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and Wigmore Hall in London.

    At the age of thirteen, Ms. Aizawa was brought to the attention of conductor Alexander Schneider on the recommendation of the pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Schneider engaged Ms. Aizawa as soloist with his Brandenburg Ensemble at the opening concerts of Tokyo's Casals Hall. Later that year, Schneider presented her in her United States début concerts at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall with his New York String Orchestra. She has since established her own unique musical voice. 

    Ms. Aizawa is also an active chamber musician. The youngest-ever participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, she has performed as a guest with string quartets such as the Guarneri Quartet and the Orion Quartet. She is a founding member of the Horszowski Trio and of the prize-winning Duo Prism. Ms. Aizawa became artistic director of the Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival in Colorado in 2010.

    Recently, Ms. Aizawa’s solo debut recording of Scriabin’s and Shostakovich’s “24 Preludes” was released by Altus in Japan, and her second album of Messiaen's and Faure's preludes is coming out in the upcoming season.  Ms. Aizawa also has a great interest in exploring unusual repertoire. - the St. Paul Pioneer Press said of her performance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hans Graf: "the Salieri Piano Concerto in C was played so splendidly by Rieko Aizawa. Hers was a graceful reading. .... Aizawa's performance lent the work a respect it rarely receives." In the same year, she received the Washington Award.  

    Ms. Aizawa was the last pupil of Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute and she also studied with Seymour Lipkin and Peter Serkin at the Juilliard School. Ms. Aizawa lives in New York City, and she is on the faculty at Bard College and Brooklyn College. Ms. Aizawa is a Steinway Artist.