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.

Violist Paul Neubauer’s exceptional musicality and effortless playing have earned him praise as “a master musician” from The New York Times. In 2025, he will release two albums for First Hand Records, each featuring the final works of two great composers: an all-Bartók album, which includes the revised version of the Viola Concerto, and a Shostakovich album, featuring the monumental Viola Sonata.

At age 21, Mr. Neubauer was appointed principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held for six years. He has since appeared as a soloist with over 100 orchestras, including the New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki Philharmonics; the Chicago, National, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, San Francisco, and Bournemouth Symphonies; and the Mariinsky, Santa Cecilia, English Chamber, and Beethovenhalle Orchestras. He has also premiered viola concertos by Béla Bartók (including the revised version of the Viola Concerto), Reinhold Glière, Gordon Jacob, Henri Lazarof, Robert Suter, Joel Phillip Friedman, Aaron Jay Kernis, Detlev Müller-Siemens, David Ott, Krzysztof Penderecki, Tobias Picker, and Joan Tower.

In addition to his solo career, Mr. Neubauer performs with SPA, a trio with soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, exploring a wide range of repertoire, including salon-style songs. He has been featured on CBS's Sunday Morning, A Prairie Home Companion, and in Strad, Strings, and People magazines. A two-time Grammy nominee, he has recorded for numerous labels, including Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, RCA Red Seal, and Sony Classical.

Mr. Neubauer is a frequent performer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and serves as the artistic director of the Mostly Music series in New Jersey. He is on the faculty of The Juilliard School and Mannes College.

The French composer Jean Françaix (1912-1997), cutting against the stylistic trends of his day, applied his considerable talents to music filled with joy and lightness. He had the advantage of having two professional musicians for parents; his father, as a composer and the director of a conservatory, was able to get input from no less an authority than Ravel, who wrote back, “Among the child’s gifts I observe above all the most fruitful an artist can possess, that of curiosity.” Françaix’s precocious start earned him a chance, at the age of ten, to take composition lessons with Nadia Boulanger, and later he studied piano at the Paris Conservatory.

Françaix was 21 and fresh off the success of his breakthrough Concertino for Piano when he composed the String Trio in C Major for the three French brothers who performed together as the Trio Pasquier. The four short movements each conjure miniature worlds of their own, starting with the bustling first movement. The bouncy scherzo uses “wrong notes” to give the impression of dance music gone awry, countered by the hushed and muted strains of melody in the Andante. The rondo finale, from its robust main theme to its sly ending, is a glittering example of how Françaix took classical ideals and made them fun and fresh.

The leap that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) made in 1781 to try his luck as a freelancer in Vienna initially seemed to pay off as he built up a lucrative career that centered on his reputation as the city’s top keyboard player. But when a war with the Ottoman Empire caused a financial downturn and scattered Vienna’s aristocrats, Mozart saw a drastic slowdown in the demand for his services as a performer and teacher, and the increasing interest in his operas and other compositions could not offset the losses. It didn’t help that he had a growing family to feed, a wife with a taste for spending lavishly on “cures,” and a gambling habit that made his finances all the more precarious. In the summer of 1788 he moved to a cheaper apartment in the suburbs, and a series of letters to his friend Michael Puchberg—a fellow freemason and textile merchant—showed that Mozart was not too proud to beg for personal loans.

Not long after finishing his masterful three final symphonies (Nos. 39-41) that summer—works created for some unknown opportunity that never panned out—Mozart turned his attention to another large project he started of his own volition, a trio that he dedicated to Puchberg. During his early adulthood in his hometown of Salzburg, Mozart wrote a number of works that were designed as lighthearted evening entertainment, many of them under the title Divertimento (K. 563). He used the same heading and a familiar six-movement structure for the trio, but this enormous, finely-crafted collection of some 45 minutes of music was clearly no throwaway score. And while it wasn’t the first composition for a trio of violin, viola and cello, there was no precedent for such an ensemble playing music of such breadth and sophistication, and as such it spawned a new genre, with Beethoven picking up the mantle in the next decade, and so many more composers following suit in the 19th and 20th centuries.