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.

Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt has appeared as a soloist with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jacksonville Symphony, and the Sphinx Chamber Orchestra; and has performed in recitals and chamber music concerts throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

As violist of the Dover Quartet, ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music, Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt won first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2013, and the grand prize in the 2010 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Her numerous awards also include top prizes at the Tokyo International Viola Competition and the Sphinx Competition.

Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Roberto Díaz, Michael Tree, Misha Amory, and Joseph de Pasquale. She received a master’s degree in string quartet performance from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where she studied with James Dunham. Ms. Pajaro-van de Stadt was appointed to faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music and teaches at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

From 1999 until its final season in 2013, Clive Greensmith was a member of the world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet, giving over one hundred performances each year in the most prestigious international venues, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, London’s South Bank, Paris Chatelet, Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Musikverein, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. He has collaborated with international artists such as Andras Schiff, Pinchas Zukerman, Leon Fleisher, Lynn Harrell, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Alicia de Larrocha, and Emanuel Ax.

Mr. Greensmith has given guest performances at prominent festivals worldwide. In North America, he has performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Cleveland Chamber Fest, and the Ravinia Festival. He is a regular guest of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and will undertake a national tour with Paul Huang, Wu Han, and Matthew Lipman in 2020. Internationally he has appeared at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, Pacific Music Festival in Japan and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. As a soloist, Clive Greensmith has performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, and the RAI Orchestra of Rome among others.

During a career spanning over twenty-five years, Mr. Greensmith has built up a catalog of landmark recordings, most notably The Complete Beethoven String Quartets for Harmonia Mundi with the Tokyo String Quartet, Mozart’s ‘Prussian’ Quartets with the Tokyo String Quartet, Brahms Cello Sonatas with Boris Berman for Biddulph Recordings, and Clarinet Trios of Beethoven and Brahms with Jon Nakamatsu and Jon Manasse for Harmonia Mundi. In June 2018 he performed the newly reconstructed Pál Hermann cello concerto (1925) with the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor, Theodor Kuchar. Toccata Classics released a live recording of his world premiere performance of the Concerto with Theodore Kuchar and the Lviv International Symphony Orchestra in the spring of 2019.

Deeply committed to the mentoring and development of young musicians, Clive has enjoyed a long and distinguished teaching career. In addition to his fifteen-year residency with the Tokyo String Quartet at Yale University, Mr. Greensmith has served as a faculty member at the Yehudi Menuhin School and Royal Northern College of Music in England, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2013, following the final concerts of the Tokyo String Quartet, Mr. Greensmith joined the faculty at the Colburn School where he is currently a professor of cello and coaches chamber music for the Conservatory of Music and the Music Academy. Students of Mr. Greensmith have gone on to secure major positions in orchestras throughout the world and have won a number of prestigious awards.

Bassist Blake Hinson joined the New York Philharmonic in 2012 after a two-year appointment as Principal Bass of the Grand Rapids Symphony. Previously, he played with the New World Symphony as a fellow and performed with The Philadelphia Orchestra. A native of West Des Moines, Iowa, Mr. Hinson was accepted at age 16 to The Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Bass Harold Robinson and Edgar Meyer. He spent three summers at the Aspen Music Festival and School on fellowship, where he played in the Aspen Chamber Symphony and Aspen Festival Orchestra and won the 2006 low strings competition. Mr. Hinson won third prize in the 2009 International Society of Bassists Double Bass Competition and made his solo debut at Boston’s Symphony Hall.

Mr. Hinson has taught at the Richard Davis Bass Foundation weekend, has coached the New York Youth Symphony bass section, and served as a clinician for Manhattan Concert Productions at Carnegie Hall.

Taiwanese-born pianist Gloria Chien has one of the most diverse musical lives as a noted performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard, and she performed again with the BSO with Keith Lockhart. She was subsequently selected by the The Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the year, “who appears to excel in everything.” Gloria is the founding Artistic Director at String Theory, a premier chamber music series in Chattanooga, TN. Together with her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, they are Artistic Directors at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, OR, and Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, VT. The duo were named recipients of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Award for Extraordinary Service in 2021

Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), already an accomplished pianist, earned a coveted slot at the Paris Conservatory when she was 15. Female students were barred from training as composers, but the composition teacher Anton Reicha recognized Farrenc’s talent and gave her private lessons that continued after she got married at seventeen and left the conservatory.

Marriage often spelled the end of a composing career for even the most talented young women of her century, but Farrenc married a man who encouraged her to keep writing, and who was able to use his access as a music publisher to advance her interests. The publishing firm’s own small concert hall hosted the first performance of Farrenc’s Piano Quintet No. 1 (Op. 30) in 1840, featuring Louise’s talented 14-year-old daughter at the piano. The publication of the score in 1842 helped further cement Farrenc’s reputation, and soon she became the first woman named to the permanent faculty of the Paris Conservatory.

Farrenc’s Quintet is scored for violin, viola, cello, bass and piano, just like Schubert’s Trout Quintet. (Quintets featuring a second violin instead of bass caught on later, starting with Schumann.) Anyone at that time who might have expected a female composer to limit herself to mild-mannered salon music would have been surprised to discover the rich and nuanced emotions of the quintet’s first movement in the key of A-minor, which gains extra energy every time the three-beat tempo switches from even eighth-notes to flowing triplets.

The slow movement arrives with the distinctive tone color of the cello voicing the melody near the top of its range, playing dolce cantabile (sweet and in a singing manner). The rapid Scherzo combines the punch of Beethoven with the effervescence of Mendelssohn, and the finale has a Mozartean glint in how the main theme crests and tumbles across the minor scale of the home key—all proof of how well Farrenc integrated lessons from beyond her Paris orbit to craft a new approach to French chamber music.

When Franz Schubert (1797-1828) turned 20 in 1817, he had not yet seen his music published, mentioned in a newspaper, or performed publicly a single time, even though he had already composed some 300 songs and a large body of orchestral and chamber music. That year he wrote one of his most memorable songs, The Trout, which transports the listener to a babbling brook from the very first notes of the piano accompaniment. In a later stanza, minor-key music and thicker textures capture the muddied waters and the spectator’s “raging blood” at seeing the fish hooked. With its earworm of a melody and an uncanny sense of drama for such a simple little tale, The Trout has always been a favorite within Schubert’s incomparable songbook.

Schubert had occasion to revisit The Trout in 1819. While traveling in upper Austria that summer, he met Sylvester Paumgartner, a friend-of-a-friend and amateur cellist who asked for a new quintet. Paumgartner specified the instrumentation of violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano, a format favored by Hummel and other composers before Schubert. (The more familiar quintet of two violins, viola, cello and piano caught on later, starting with Schumann.) Paumgartner also requested a theme-and-variations movement based specifically on The Trout.

This Piano Quintet in A Major (D. 667) offers many pleasures beyond its signature movement. The opening Allegro vivace plays with a rising arpeggio gesture that interjects and comments around the singing themes, setting up the same kind of active discourse between melody and accompaniment found in so many of Schubert’s songs. (The rising arpeggios also foreshadow the “Trout” music still to come.) The Andante movement makes exquisite use of the quintet’s available textures, including tender duets for viola and cello, surrounded by a multilayered accompaniment. In the Scherzo, the heft of the double bass makes the speedy music all the more muscular.

The fourth movement jumps straight into the “Trout” theme, outlined by the strings in a simple Andantino treatment. The piano’s sparkling octaves and trills add an element of kinetic motion, and the variations continue to intensify the rhythmic and harmonic elements at play. The variation closest in character to the original song comes last, with the telltale rippling patterns shared between the piano and the strings. Related gestures continue to arise in the enigmatic finale, unifying this very grand quintet around ideas that began with a humble little fish.