Performer, curator, and on-stage host James Austin Smith “proves that an oboist can have an adventurous solo career.” (The New Yorker). Smith appears at leading national and international chamber music festivals, as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble. As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music, Smith creates intimate evenings of music, food, and drink in New York and San Francisco, as well as an annual festival in a variety of global destinations. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music in the San Francisco Bay Area and mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and as a regular guest at London’s Guildhall School. A Fulbright scholar and alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and CMS’s Bowers Program, he holds degrees in music and political science from Northwestern and Yale University.

Bulgarian-American violinist Bella Hristova has won international acclaim for her “expressive nuance and rich tone” (New York Times) and “impressive power and control” (Washington Post). An Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, she has also won First Prize in the Michael Hill International Violin Competition, First Prize in the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and is a Laureate of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.

Hristova has performed extensively as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, Asia, Europe, Latin America and New Zealand. In addition to her many appearances with orchestras, Hristova has performed recitals at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum, and performs frequently with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A champion of music by living composers, Hristova has commissioned composers including Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Joan Tower, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Hristova was the featured soloist for a consortium of eight major orchestras for a new concerto commission written for her by her husband, acclaimed composer David Serkin Ludwig. Most recently, Hristova recorded Ludwig’s violin concerto with JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Hristova began violin studies at the age of six in her native Bulgaria. She later studied with Ida Kavafian at the Curtis Institute of Music, and received her Artist Diploma studying with Jaime Laredo at Indiana University. She plays on a 1655 Nicolo Amati violin and lives in New York City with her husband David and their four beloved cats.

Praised for his uniquely beautiful playing and mature artistry, violinist Oliver Neubauer is quickly establishing himself as one of the most exciting young artists of his time. First prize winner of the 2023 Susan Wadsworth Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Oliver is an inaugural YCA Jacobs Fellow and is managed worldwide by Young Concert Artists.

Highlights of the 2024-25 season include Oliver’s recital debuts at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and Merkin Hall in NY for Young Concert Artists, concerto debuts with the Delaware Symphony and Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, and performances at London’s Wigmore Hall collaborating with Sir András Schiff and other members of the Kronberg Academy. Oliver will also appear at Jupiter Chamber Players (NY), the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach (FL), Friends of Chamber Music (MO), Buffalo Chamber Music Society (NY), Hayden’s Ferry Chamber Music Series (AZ), and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (NY), among others. During the summer of 2025, Oliver will return to the Marlboro Music Festival. Oliver will also be making his debut in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall in the Fall of 2025 as the recipient of the 2024 Gershen Cohen Award from the Juilliard School.

Praised by the Seattle Times as “Simply marvelous” and Taiwan’s Liberty Times for “astonishingly capturing the spirit of the music,” violinist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu enjoys a versatile career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. 

Spotlighted as the cover story of Monterey County Weekly in September of 2023 and Marie Claire Taiwan’s 2004 September issue “Young Power”, Cindy has been featured as a soloist with orchestras such as the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra. Renowned artists with whom she has collaborated in concerts include Yefim Bronfman, James Ehnes, Gary Graffman, Lynn Harrell, Leila Josefowicz, Kim Kashkashian, Ani and Ida Kavafian, Cho-Liang Lin, Anthony Marwood, Midori, Thomas Quasthoff, Yuja Wang, and members of the Alban Berg, Brentano, Cleveland, Emerson, Guarneri, Miró, and Tokyo string quartets. She frequently performs at the world’s most prominent venues such as the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Deutsches Theater München, the National Concert Hall of Taiwan, and festivals such as Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Summerfest, Mainly Mozart, the Marlboro Music Festival, Music@Menlo, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. She has also collaborated as a guest violist with Dover, Formosa, Johannes, Orion, and Shanghai quartets. 

Cindy is a recipient of many awards including the Milka Violin Artist Prize from the Curtis Institute of Music, and third prize at the International Violin Competition of David Oistrakh. She taught violin, chamber music, and string pedagogy at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern California, and has been on faculty at the Encore School for Strings, the Curtis Institute of Music’s Young Artist Summer Program and Yale School of Music’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Passionate about programming, Cindy is the Music Director of New Asia Chamber Music Society, Director of Chamber Music at the Hidden Valley Music Seminars, founder of Sunkiss’d Mozart, and she has curated programs for the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles as the Artistic Partner and Artist in Residence.

Winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Arnaud Sussmann has distinguished himself with his unique sound, bravura, and profound musicianship. Minnesota’s Pioneer Press writes, “Sussmann has an old-school sound reminiscent of vintage recordings by Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler, a rare combination of sweet and smooth that can hypnotize a listener.”

Mr. Sussmann has recently appeared as a soloist with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, and the Vancouver, and New World Symphonies. As a chamber musician, he has performed at the Tel Aviv Museum, London’s Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, and the White Nights Festival in Saint Petersburg. He has also given concerts at the Caramoor, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, and Seattle Chamber Music festivals, collaborating with many of today’s leading artists including Itzhak Perlman, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Wu Han, David Finckel, and Jan Vogler.

Sussmann is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, Co-Director of Music@Menlo’s International Program, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

Mr. Sussmann plays a 1731 Stradivarius violin on loan from a private owner.

Jay Campbell is a cellist actively exploring a wide range of creative music. He has been recognized for approaching both old and new music with the same curiosity and commitment, and his performances have been called “electrifying” by the New York Times and “gentle, poignant, and deeply moving” by the Washington Post.

The only musician ever to receive two Avery Fisher Career Grants — in 2016 as a soloist, and again in 2019 as a member of the JACK Quartet — Jay made his concerto debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and in 2016, he worked with Alan Gilbert as the artistic director for Ligeti Forward, part of the New York Philharmonic Biennale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017, he was Artist-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival along with frequent collaborator violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, where he gave the premiere of Luca Francesconi’s cello concerto Das Ding Singt. In 2018 he appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has recorded the concertos of George Perle and Marc-Andre Dalbavie with the Seattle Symphony, and in 2023/2024 will premiere a new concerto, Reverdecer, by Andreia Pinto-Correia with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Portugal, and in Brazil with the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo. In 2022 he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as curator and cellist for his second Green Umbrella concert, premiering two concertos by Wadada Leo Smith and inti figgis-vizueta. 

Jay’s primary artistic interest is the collaboration with living creative musicians and has worked in this capacity with Catherine Lamb, John Luther Adams, Marcos Balter, Tyshawn Sorey, and many others. His close association with John Zorn resulted in two discs of new works for cello, Hen to Pan (2015) and Azoth (2020). Deeply committed as a chamber musician, he is the cellist of the JACK Quartet as well as the Junction Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao, and multidisciplinary collective AMOC.

Born in New York, Kenneth Weiss began his musical studies on piano. After attending the High School of Performing Arts he entered the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It was through his studies on organ and harpsichord that he became aware of the vast early keyboard repertoire and decided to devote his professional life to it. He continued his studies with Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory and in 1985 settled in France where he is still based today.

Kenneth Weiss has worked as an accompanist, vocal coach, opera continuist, chamber musician, conductor and soloist for several decades, performing extensively in Europe, North America and Asia. A dedicated teacher, he is currently professor of chamber music at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris.

In 1723, after six years of working in Cöthen for a musically inclined prince, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) landed a prestigious church job in Leipzig. He was consumed at first by the enormous task of writing and rehearsing scared music for weekly services (as well as training the young choristers who would sing it), but over time he reclaimed enough leisure time to take on a side job leading the Collegium Musicum, a group of talented amateurs who performed at a local coffee house.

Bach reveled in the opportunity to present instrumental music again. He dusted off old scores from earlier jobs, and he also created a whole new body of compositions for large ensemble, including his two surviving violin concertos from around 1730.

Bach’s greatest inspiration for his violin concertos came from the Italian master of the form, Antonio Vivaldi, who perfected the ritornello structure in which a main theme returns multiple times to punctuate the form. The essential theme of the first movement of the Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor (BWV 1041) emphasizes pairs of rising notes, first making a bold leap up the interval of a fourth, and then returning for a narrow rise of a half-step.

So much of the emotional tension in the Andante slow movement occurs in the simple but profound bass line: its steady pulses, its hopeful ascents, and its many long silences that leave the soloist with only the fragile support of violins and violas. The rolling triplet pulse of the Allegro assai finale is akin to the gigue (or, as it called in the British isles, the jig), the dance style that ends many of Bach’s instrumental suites.

When Bach started his Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major (BWV 1042) with three chords and a pause, he was rehashing a stock opening that can be found in some two dozen of Vivaldi’s concertos. Where Bach excelled was in taking such simple material on unimaginable journeys through surprising keys and sophisticated counterpoint, all while making the most of the violin’s technical capabilities. The recognizable figure of a rising triad spread across three steady beats cascades from voice to voice and passes through a range of keys, making its most striking arrival in the ominous key of C-sharp minor. The journey to that contrasting key area proves even more significant when it turns out to be the home key of the Adagio, a poignant lament the concentrates the richest countermelodies in the lower strings. The Allegro assai finale adheres to the classic ritornello format, in which tutti statements return after each exploratory episode from the soloist.

Very few of the concertos that Bach composed during his years in Cöthen have survived, but some of the lost manuscripts can be reconstructed from the transcriptions he went on to make for Collegium Musicum concerts. Some old works found new life as harpsichord concertos for his talented sons to perform, and details within the keyboard parts hint at the original instruments Bach had in mind. Twentieth-century scholars followed those clues to recreate the Concerto in C Minor for Oboe and Violin (BWV 1060R), the presumed source for the existing Concerto for Two Keyboards in C Minor.

In the opening movement, the part Bach adapted for the second keyboard soloist undoubtedly originated on the violin, with figures divided between two adjacent strings, one moving melodically, the other holding constant. In the first solo part, the sustained tones suggest that the music was first conceived for oboe, given its ability to shape long, slow-moving phrases with the breath.

The gorgeous middle movement weaves the two solo voices in fluid counterpoint, supported by a gentle, rocking pulse of accompaniment. In the fast finale, the more virtuosic material goes to the violin soloist, who barrels through quick sextuplets under leaping figures from the oboe. As Bach’s son and onetime Collegium member C.P.E. Bach later wrote, “From his youth up to fairly old age, … [Bach] played the violin purely and with a penetrating tone and thus kept the orchestra in top form, much better than he could have from the harpsichord. He completely understood the possibilities of all stringed instruments.”

Georg Phillip Telemann (1681-1767) was the most respected German composer during his lifetime, influencing and overshadowing his slightly younger colleague, J. S. Bach. During Telemann’s years as a law student in Leipzig, he founded the Collegium Musicum that Bach eventually directed, and that hands-on practice with instrumental forms helped Telemann secure one of his first jobs with a duke in Eisenach, the same town where Bach had been born. Telemann eventually landed what was arguably the most prestigious post in all of Germany, directing music for the principal churches of Hamburg from 1721 until his death 46 years later.

Even amid the demands of writing all the required church music week after week (eventually adding up to some 1,500 cantatas), Telemann kept up his longtime interest in secular instrumental music. Under the banner of Tafelmusik or “table music”—meaning the kind of music fit to entertain guests while dining—Telemann collected three “productions” that each combined orchestral suites, concertos and chamber music into a readymade dinner party playlist. This ambitious publication from 1733 showed how Telemann capitalized on his international reputation to bolster his church salary, attracting subscribers from Germany and beyond who pre-ordered this Musique de table, as its original title page labeled it. French patrons accounted for 33 of the 206 subscriptions; another set bound for London was ordered by none other than Handel, who went on to quote and imitate Telemann’s music liberally.

Telemann’s musical approach was as international as his appeal. In true French style, he adopted the dance forms that had been popularized in the court of the dance-loving King Louis XIV, including the Siciliana style found in the outer largo sections of the movement the begins the Quartet in G Major (TWV 43:G2), a charming chamber music diversion within the larger first production of Tafelmusik. The second movement uses counterpoint to showcase in turn each of the featured instruments: flute, violin and oboe. The grave third movement serves as a short transition intoa lively finale based on the swaying pulse of the gigue.