Drawing from their diverse experiences as soloists and chamber musicians, the members of the quintet, La Fenice, are widely recognized as some of the most admired musicians performing before the public today. La Fenice members Catherine Cho, violin, Maria Lambros, viola, Peggy Pearson, oboe, Marcy Rosen, cello and Diane Walsh, piano had performed together informally for many years at summer festivals and concert series around the country. They were moved to formalize their association after the terrible events of September 11, 2001, and their name, which is the Italian word for phoenix, was inspired by the image of the mythical bird which rises reborn from the ashes and symbolizes beauty and the immortality of art.
La Fenice performs regularly at the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival in Maryland, the Skaneateles Festival in New York, and the Winsor Music Chamber Music Series in Massachusetts. The group offers repertoire for piano quartet, oboe and string trio, and for smaller groupings, and frequently commissions new works for these combinations as well.
The Schenectady (NY) Gazette praised La Fenice's "impressive debut" on the Union College Concert Series and the Syracuse Post-Standard wrote of a Skaneateles Festival performance "all players [were] operating at the highest level of technical achievement and interpretive involvement." Other series where the group has appeared are Pro Musica in Joplin, MO, and Friends of Chamber Music in Reading, PA.
La Fenice's debut recording, Paul Moravec's "Useful Knowledge: A Franklin Fantasy" (with baritone Randall Scarlata and glass armonica player Cecilia Brauer), will be released on the Naxos label in late 2011.
La Fenice: Bio
Catherine Cho - violin
Praised by The New York Times for her "sublime tone," Catherine Cho has appeared worldwide as soloist with orchestras and chamber ensembles as well as in recital.
Catherine Cho's orchestral engagements have included performances with the Detroit and National Symphony orchestras, the Virginia Symphony, the Montreal, Edmonton, and National Arts Centre Orchestras in Canada, the Korean Broadcasting Symphony, Daejon Philharmonic, and Seoul Philharmonic in Korea, the Barcelona Symphony, the Orchestra of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and the Aspen Chamber Symphony. She has toured Israel with the Haifa Symphony, and was the soloist on a concert tour in Japan and Korea with the Juilliard Orchestra and Hugh Wolff conducting. Her collaborations with distinguished conductors include Mstislav Rostropovich, Robert Spano, Sixten Ehrling, and Franz-Paul Decker. Ms. Cho's concert performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, with the Buffalo Philharmonic under the baton of Jo-Ann Falletta, was broadcast nationwide on PBS Television in January 2002. Her live recording of the Four Seasons with the Korean Chamber Ensemble was released in June 2003.
As a recitalist and chamber musician, Catherine Cho has performed on the prestigious stages of Alice Tully Hall with the Chamber Music Society at New York's Lincoln Center, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Casals Hall in Tokyo as a member of the Casals Hall Ensemble, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 92nd St. "Y", the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston, and on Ravinia's "Rising Stars" series in Chicago. She has collaborated with pianist, Mia Chung, in performances of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s violin sonatas in the U. S. and Asia. Ms. Cho was a participant in the Marlboro Music Festival from 1993 - 2001, and has taken part in eleven “Musicians from Marlboro” national tours. Ms. Cho has performed at festivals such as Chamber Music Northwest, Bridgehampton, Eastern Shore, Santa Fe, and Skaneateles, and has performed with the Boston Chamber Players. She was a member of the Johannes String Quartet from 2003-2006.
A winner of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ms. Cho won top prizes at the Montreal, Hanover, and Queen Elizabeth International Violin Competitions. She has served on the jury of international violin competitions and taught master classes worldwide. Ms. Cho is a member of the violin faculty at the Juilliard School, and has taught at the Starling-DeLay Symposium, New York String Seminar, Killington Music Festival, Seoul Music Festival and Academy, Heifetz Institute, and the Perlman Music Program. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, Todd Phillips, and their son, Brandon.
Maria Lambros - viola
Violist Maria Lambros has performed as a chamber musician throughout the world as a member of three of the country's finest string quartets in venues such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, London's Wigmore Hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, New York's Lincoln Center and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She was a member of the renowned Ridge String Quartet, which was nominated for the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for their recording of the Dvorak Piano Quintets with pianist Rudolf Firkusny on the RCA label. The recording won Europe's prestigious Diapason d'Or in the same year. Whe was also a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Meliora String Quartet, which was Quartet-in-Residence a the Spoleto Festivals of the U.S., Italy and Australia, and which recorded Mendelssohn's Octet with the Cleveland Quartet on the Telarc label. She was most recently a member of the Mendelssohn String Quartet.
Maria Lambros appears regularly at a number of major chamber music festivals, including those of Helsinki, Aspen, Vancouver, Tanglewood, Santa Fe, La Jolla, Caramoor, Norfolk, Rockport, Skaneateles, Eastern Shore, Yellow Barn, Bard, Cascade Head, Chamber Music West, New York's Mostly Mozart Festival and the Chateau Series in Turin, Italy. She was a member of the Ridge Ensemble, with which she toured the U.S. and recorded the Dvorak Piano Quartet, Op. 87 with Rudolf Firkusny. She has also performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Da Camera Society and Context of Houston, with flutist Paula Robison at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has performed with the Guarneri, Cleveland, Juilliard, Muir, Brentano, Borromeo, Colorado and Orion Quartets, among others.
Maria Lambros attended the Eastman School of Music, where she received the prestigious Performer's Certificate, and earned a Master's degree in Humanities from New York University. A native of Missoula, Montana, she was named one of "Montana's Leading Artists and Entertainers of the 20th Century," a millenial list highlighting the last 100 years of Montanans' exceptional contributions to art and culture. A devoted teacher, Ms. Lambros is currently a member of the faculty of Peabody Conservatory of Music and has been on the faculties of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, Harvard University, University of Delaware, Florida State University and the Longy School of Music. She is a faculty member of the Yellow Barn Music School.
Peggy Pearson - oboe
Peggy Person is a winner of the Pope Foundation Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Music. Lloyd Schwartz, who received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, called her "my favorite living oboist." Ms. Pearson gave her New York debut with soprano Dawn Upshaw in 1995, a program featuring the premiere of John Harbison's Chorale Cantata, which was written specifically for them. She has performed solo, chamber and orchestral music throughout the United States and abroad. A member of the Bach Aria Group, Ms. Pearson is also solo oboist with the Emmanuel Chamber Orchestra, an organization that has performed the complete cycle of sacred cantatas by J.S. Bach. According to Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe, "Peggy Pearson has probably played more Bach than any other oboist of her generation; this is music she plays in a state of eloquent grace." Ms. Pearson is director of Winsor Music, Inc.; she is also Artistic Director of, and oboist with, the Winsor Music Chamber Series in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Marcy Rosen - cello
Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her “one of the intimate art’s abiding treasures.” She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States. She made her concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen and has since appeared with such noted orchestras as the Dallas Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the Caramoor Festival Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Jupiter Symphony and Concordia Chamber Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tokyo Symphony at the famed Orchard Hall in Tokyo. In recital she has appeared in New York at such acclaimed venues as Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street “Y” and Merkin Concert Hall; in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery, where she for many years she hosted a series entitled “Marcy Rosen and Friends.”
A consummate soloist, Ms. Rosen’s superb musicianship is enhanced by her many chamber music activities. She has collaborated with the world’s finest musicians including Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Andras Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Isaac Stern, Robert Mann, Kim Kashkashian, Lucy Shelton, Charles Neidich and the Juilliard, Emerson, and Orion Quartets. She is a founding member of the world renowned Mendelssohn String Quartet and with this group she was Artist-in-Residence at the North Carolina School of the Arts and for nine years served as Blodgett-Artist-in Residence at Harvard University. The Quartet tours annually throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.
She performs regularly at festivals both here and abroad, including the Caramoor, Santa Fe, Ravinia, Saratoga and Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festivals, the Seattle International Music Festival, the Lockenhaus Kammermusikfest in Austria and the International Musicians Seminar in England. Since 1986 she has been the co-artistic director of the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival in Maryland and as a long time participant at the Marlboro Music Festival she has taken part in eighteen of their “Musicians from Marlboro” tours and performed in concerts celebrating the 40th and 50th Anniversaries of the Festival.
The recipient of many awards and prizes, Marcy Rosen won the 1986 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and was further honored with the Walker Fund Prize and the Mortimer Levitt Career Development Award. She is the winner of the Washington International Competition for Strings and was the first recipient of the Mischa Schneider Memorial Award from the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation.
Marcy Rosen was born in Phoenix, Arizona and her teachers have included Gordon Epperson, Orlando Cole, Marcus Adeney, Felix Galimir, Karen Tuttle and Sandor Vegh. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. Ms. Rosen is currently Associate Professor of Cello at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the Faculty at the Mannes College of Music in New York City. She has also served on the faculties of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory and the University of Delaware.
Her performances can be heard on recordings from the BIS, Bridge. Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks, Musical Heritage Society, Phillips, Nonesuch, Pro Arte, and Koch labels among others.
Diane Walsh - piano
Pianist Diane Walsh, described by the Boston Globe as “a performer of great honesty and integrity, a pianist with superb technique…” regularly performs solo recitals, concertos and chamber music worldwide. In the fall of 2007, Diane Walsh joined the cast of 33 Variations, the new play by Moisés Kaufman in its debut production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. The work is focused on Beethoven’s last years and his composition of the Diabelli Variations, which Ms. Walsh performs on stage throughout the play. After a subsequent run at the La Jolla Playhouse, 33 Variations opened on Broadway last spring at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, starring Jane Fonda and with Ms. Walsh as the pianist. From February through May 2009, Ms. Walsh appeared in 113 performances. She has also released a recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Sonata Op. 78 on the Jonathan Digital Recordings label.
Ms. Walsh has given recitals at the 92 Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, Merkin Concert Hall and the Miller Theatre in New York City, the Kennedy Center in Washington, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw’s Kleine Zaal in Amsterdam, Philharmonic Hall in Leningrad, Dvorak Hall in Prague, the Mozarteum in Salzburg and in other major cities in the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
Her recent concerto engagements include the Bartok Concerto No. 3 with the Austin Symphony Orchestra, the Strauss Burleske with the Syracuse and Delaware symphony orchestras, the Berg Kammerkonzert with Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra in New York City and Mozart Concerto No. 24 with David Zinman at the Skaneateles Festival. She has appeared with the radio symphonies of Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Berlin, the San Francisco Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony and the St. Louis Symphony, toured with the Orpheus and the St. Luke’s orchestras and soloed with orchestras in Brazil, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Russia.
In demand as a chamber musician, she has performed at many festivals including Marlboro, Santa Fe, Bard, Appalachian Summer, Music From Salem, Eastern Shore, the International Musician’s Seminar in Cornwall, and Strings Music Festival. She has been a guest artist with the Fine Arts, Brentano, Lydian and Mendelssohn quartets, and she is the pianist of the Walsh-Drucker-Cooper Trio.
From 1999 to 2004 Ms. Walsh was Artistic Director of the Skaneateles Festival, held annually during August in upstate New York. During her tenure she presented world-renowned performers, designed and performed in innovative chamber music and chamber orchestra programs, arranged open rehearsals, children’s concerts, and master classes, and co-created and performed in theatrical events such as “An Evening with Bill Irwin” and “The Love Letters of Robert and Clara,” set to music by the Schumanns.
Her many awards include the top prizes at the Munich ARD International Piano Competition and the Salzburg International Mozart Competition. She won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, both of which presented her in New York recitals, and she was a prizewinner in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and also won that competition’s chamber music award. Ms. Walsh won prizes in the J. S. Bach International Competition in Washington D.C., the William Kapell International Competition in Maryland and the Busoni International Competition in Italy. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Education Fund.
Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times praised Ms. Walsh’s Bridge CD “Sonatas and Preludes” for its “romantic sweep and arching lyricism.” She has made fifteen recordings for Bridge, Nonesuch, Koch, Newport, Sony, Stereophile, CRI and other labels. In 2007 she began recording the complete Schubert piano sonatas for Jonathan Digital Recordings; the first volume was released in 2008 and volume two will be released in May 2010. Ms. Walsh’s major teacher was Irwin Freundlich at the Juilliard School, and she also studied with Richard Goode at Mannes College. She is a Steinway Artist.