Tickets: $10/$5 students

PROGRAM:

Three Pieces for String Quartet - Igor Stravinsky
String Quartet in G, op. 77 no. 1 - Joseph Haydn
Minuet in A, Fugue in A, Scherzo in A, Crisantemi - Giacomo Puccini
String Quartet in g, D. 173 - Franz Schubert
Allegro con brio

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Although newly formed, the members of the Brunell String Quartet are no strangers to the chamber music world. They have performed across Canada, the United States and Europe in some of the most prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Seiji Ozawa Hall, the Leipziger Gewandhaus, the Wiener Saal and the Mozarteum in Austria.

A recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Professional Musicians, violinist Jessica Tong has performed as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician across Canada, the United States and Germany. She began her musical studies on the piano at the age of three, but discovered a fascination for the violin soon after. By the age of ten, she was named the youngest winner of the Toronto Symphony Solo Piano Competition and was also awarded the David Ouchterlony Award for Most Promising Young Pianist afterwards. This led to performances at venues such as the Roy Thompson Hall, Glenn Gould Centre for the Performing Arts and the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. By the age of fourteen, she was the Grand Prizewinner in the Canadian Music Competitions as a violinist. Shortly after, she went on to win concerto competitions with the Waterloo Chamber Orchestra, the Cathedral Bluffs Symphony Orchestra and the Oshawa-Durham Symphony Orchestra, and was invited to reappear as a guest soloist with all three orchestras, as well as with the Toronto Philharmonia and the Pickering Philharmonia in their following seasons.

An avid chamber musician, Ms. Tong has already had the opportunity to work with artists such as Cho-Liang Lin, Midori Goto, Leon Fleischer, Leone Buyse and Courtney Orlando from the critically acclaimed ensemble Alarm Will Sound, as well as members of the Cleveland, Concord, Brentano, Guarneri, American and Leipzig Quartets. She is an equally strong advocate of contemporary music, having performed in the Syzygy and Musiqa concert series in Houston, as well as the CAGE new music series in Baltimore. She has performed on behalf of the Peabody Institute at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. as a part of the Kennedy Conservatory Project- a concert series designed to feature rising artists from the top ten American music schools. Recent projects have included performing with members of the National Symphony in the newly founded Ensemble Ulysse chamber music series in Washington D.C., the Evolution contemporary music series and An Die Musik Live! series in Baltimore and the Academy Museum of Art Series in Easton, Maryland.

Ms. Tong is currently completing a graduate diploma under full scholarship with Pamela Frank at the Peabody Institute. She has also studied with Kathleen Winkler at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and worked with Zhang yun Zhang, Donald Weilerstein and Milan Vitek.

Ruby Chen, violin, was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and began studying the violin at the age of seven. She is pursuing her Master’s degree at the Yale School of Music, where she studies with Ani Kavafian. Ms. Chen received her Bachelor of Music degree and Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Mikhail Kopelman, a former member of the Borodin and Tokyo String Quartets. As a freshman in 2004, she won the Violin Concerto Competition and performed Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto with the Eastman Philharmonia under the baton of Maestro Neil Varon.

Ms Chen has been a gifted musician from her early childhood. In 1993, she entered Tun Hua Taipei Musical School as a top student majoring in both violin and piano. While in Taiwan, she was under the instruction of violinists An-Hsiang Kao and Chih-Yuan Ing. At the age of twelve, she became concertmaster of the Tun Hua Symphony Orchestra and participated in numerous violin competitions with great success. She was also featured as a soloist in televised performances. In the summer of 1997, she attended the Heifetz International Music Institute and studied with eminent musicians such as Daniel Heifetz and Pinchas Zukerman. The same year, she immigrated along with her family to Toronto, Canada, where she studied privately with Arkady Yanivker. Since 1998, Ruby has resided in Canada and has continued garnering musical achievements at events such as the Kiwanis Festival and Canadian Music Competition. She was also a substitute violinist of the Toronto Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kerry Stratton, for a year. She has been involved in the Huntsville Festival, Summit Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, New York String Orchestra Seminar, and three summers as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has worked with conductors such as James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Herbert Blomstedt, Peter Oundjian, Mark Elder, Helmuth Rilling, Alexander Lazarev, Jaime Laredo, Oliver Knussen, Sir Andrew Davis, André Previn, Michael Stern, and Stefan Asbury.

The 2007 recipient of the Luke B. Hancock Foundation Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center, violist Jessica Chang began her studies at age thirteen in northern California. She has appeared as a soloist with the Yale University Bach Society and received awards from the American String Teachers Association, the Fresno Musical Club, and the Peninsula Symphony Young Artists. Ms. Chang has been a fellowship recipient at the Tanglewood, Aspen, and California Music Festivals, and has served as principal violist of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Opera Theatre of Yale College, and the Yale Collegium Musicum. She is a current finalist with the New World Symphony.

As a member of the Adonia String Quartet, Ms. Chang was a semifinalist at the 2004 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the Grand Prize winner of the 2004 California VOCE Competition. At Yale, she co-founded the Yale College Chamber Music Society with a Louis B. Sudler Award, and has commissioned and premiered a chamber work by composer-pianist Timothy Andres. She is also a founding member of Yale’s Resonance Chamber Ensemble.

Ms. Chang is a rising senior at Yale College, and recently spent a year as a visiting student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Her primary teachers have included Jenny Rudin, Jesse Levine, Jodi Levitz, and Daniel Panner.

Ms. Chang is also an avid Chinese harpist—she has performed as soloist with the North American Elite Youth Orchestra and was a semifinalist in the 2001 Beijing’s Dragon’s Cup International Chinese Musical Instruments Competition. In addition to music, she maintains a diverse array of interests, including education, psychology, and writing. She has taught for the Scholars Program at Elm City College Preparatory School in New Haven, Connecticut, at a public K-8 school for the America SCORES program in San Francisco, and middle school as a teacher for Breakthrough Collaborative in San Jose, California. As a high school student she served as a research assistant at Stanford’s Department of Psychology on a government-funded cognitive science study on child development. In addition, her poetry has been published by the North Central Review, the America Library of Poetry and the American Literacy Council, and numerous literary magazines at Yale.

Cellist Elizabeth Means has shared her versatile artistry as concert soloist, recitalist, orchestral and chamber musician throughout Europe and United States in some of the worlds leading concert halls, while collaborating with some of the most prominent artists of our time such as James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Kurt Masur, Thomas Quasthoff, Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos and Sir Simon Rattle. A consistent prize winner, including a full scholarship from the A.L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation for studies at the Manhattan School of Music, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Karl Zeise Memorial Cello Prize, and a Fellowship from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. She made her Carnegie Hall debut this year as soloist with Pinchas Zuckerman and the Manhattan School of Music’s Chamber Sinfonia.

Currently, Ms. Means serves as principal cellist of the 2008 Chamber Sinfonia and Kurt Masur Seminar Orchestra. She is a member of the prestigious contemporary music Claremont Ensemble led by the famed composer Richard Danielpour and has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has had master classes with Yo-Yo Ma, Isaac Stern, and Lynn Harrell among others, and was invited this spring to record and film with Bobby McFerrin for PBS. Ms. Means is a student of Alan Stepansky and has completed her first year as a candidate for a Master of Music in Orchestra Performance at the Manhattan School of Music.

The members of the Brunell Quartet first met in the summer of 2007 at the Tanglewood Music Center, making their debut together performing the Barber String Quartet in Seiji Ozawa Hall. While they maintain rigorous individual schedules, they are deeply committed as a quartet to developing music as a form of communication and a viable language to increase its accessibility to all audiences. This season, they are scheduled to make their debut as a quartet at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Other projects include performances and masterclasses in Lenox, Massachussetts; Baltimore, Maryland; New York City, New Haven, Connecticut; and Princeton, New Jersey.