Conference artists.

(Information subject to change)

Rising Stars Concert

Saturday, March 16
8:00 P.M.

Hsing-ay Hsu, pianist

Since making her stage debut at age 4, Hsing-ay Hsu has performed at notable venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Weill Hall at Carnegie (a sold-out recital), and has performed abroad in Beijing, Prague, Kromeriz, Shanghai, and Taipei. Her Brahms D-Minor Concerto performance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was reviewed by the Washington Post to be full of "power, authority and self-assurance."

Hsu is the 2000 Juilliard William Petschek Debut Pianist. She is also the 2001 recipient of a McCrane Foundation Artist Grant. Other honors include the prestigious Gilmore Young Artist Award in 1997 and second prize in the 1996 William Kapell International Piano Competition. As a 1995 United States Presidential Scholar of the Arts, she was awarded a USA Gold Medallion by President Clinton at the White House. She also has garnered prizes in the 1995 NFAA Artistic Recognition Talent Search (highest honor), the 1993 Stravinsky Awards International Piano Competition, the 1989 Young Keyboard Artists Association International Piano Competition and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Young Artist Auditions.

Born in Beijing, she bagan piano studies with her parents at age 3, continuing with Fei-Ping Hsu, Herbert Stessin at Juilliard and Claude Frank at Yale University, which she attended on a 1999 Paul and Daisy Soros Graduate Fellowship Prize. She has participated in Ravinia's Steans Institute, the Aspen Music Festival, the Juilliard-Columbia University Exchange and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

Julie Albers, cellist

Julie Albers's international career was launched during 1998-1999, a season that brought her to New Zealand's Dunedin Sinfonia and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra--in addition to prestigious American debuts with The Newport Music Festival, Hawaii's Prince Albert Music Festival and the Sarasota Music Festival. That season, she made her debut with Germany's Philharmonisches Orchester Augsburg.

Julie began her 2001-2002 season by winning the second prize from Munich's Internationalen Musikwettbewerbes der ARD. She was also awarded the Wilhelm-Weichsler-Musikpreis der Stadt Osnabruck 2001, carrying with it a pair of debut performances with the Osnabrucker Symphonieorchester, conducted by Lothar Konigs.

Raised in Longmont, Colorado, Ms. Albers began violin studies at the age of 2 with her mother, switching to the cello at age 4. She moved to Cleveland during her junior year in high school to pursue studies through the Young Artist Program at The Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Richard Aaron. Julie also studied at Ohio's Encore School for Strings and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. In 1999, Ms. Albers was the recipient of The Cleveland Cello Society Scholarship (Senior Division Prize); later that year, she was awarded the Grand Prize at the XIII International Competition for Young Musicians, sponsored by France's Orchestre Symphonique de Douai. Other honors include a finalist placing in the Stulberg International String Competition and being named a prize winner in the Johansen International String Competition in Washington, D.C.

Julie Albers plays a cello crafted in 1790 in Naples by Vincenzo Ventapane.

The Eroica Trio
Sunday, March 17
8:00 P.M.

The GRAMMY-nominated Eroica Trio is one of the first all-female chamber ensembles to reach the top echelons of their field. Pianist Erika Nickrenz, violinist Adela Pena and cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogia have been electrifying the concert stage with their combination of technical virtuosity, vivid artistic interpretation and contagious exuberance in performance for more than a decade. The Trio won the prestigious 1991 Naumburg Award, resulting in an acclaimed Lincoln Center Debut and has since toured the United States, Europe and Asia. While maintaining this demanding concert schedule, the Trio has released three celebrated recordings.

During the 2001-2002 season, the Eroica Trio will be performing more than eighty concerts throughout the United States in Chicago (Ravinia), Los Angeles, Portland, Honolulu, Cincinnati, Houston and Seattle, and abroad. Extensive international tours will take the group to a Far East tour of Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Korea and Taiwan. The Eroica Trio also is the featured guest artist on Carnegie Hall's prestigious Neighborhood Concerts series.

The Trio took its name from Beethoven's passionate Third Symphony. Italian for "heroic," it is a word that aptly reflects the ensemble's approach to their art. The Trio has established a unique identity by creating innovative programs that span 300 years of music.

The Trio's members are prolific commissioners with at least one world premiere every season. This season, they will premiere a work commissioned for them by the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild by composer Scott Warner, entitled "Blessings to the Goddess."

Immediately following their acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut in 1997, the Eroica Trio was offered an exclusive five-recording contract by Angel/EMI Classics Records. The Trio's self-titled debut CD was awarded NPR "Performance Today's" "Debut Recording of the Year" and featured in Time Out New York's "Top Ten Recordings" of 1997. The Trio's critically acclaimed third recording, entitled "Baroque," was released in November 1999 and spent the next nine months in the top 20 on Billboard's charts.

In addition to this demanding concert and recording schedule, the Eroica Trio is committed to music education, giving concerts, master classes and shows specifically geared toward children at elementary schools and colleges throughout the country. This season's residencies include Portland State University, University of Washington and Columbus State University. Each summer, the Trio performs at music festivals throughout the world, including the Hollywood Bowl, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, and Spoleto, Italy.

The Eroica Trio has appeared on numerous television programs including ABC's The View, CNN's Showbiz Today and Worldbeat, CBS and ABC News, CBS Saturday Morning, A&E's Breakfast with the Arts, The Oxygen Network, Bloomberg TV and Fox's The Crier Report.

The women who make up the Eroica Trio are each top-ranked, award-winning soloists who have performed on many of the world's great stages. Erika Nickrenz, who made her concerto debut at New York's Town Hall at the age of 11, was a featured soloist on the PBS series Live from Lincoln Center, and has enjoyed a solo career that has taken her across America and Canada, and to Italy, Switzerland and Australia. Adela Pena garnered first prize at the Washington International competition and has toured extensively as a soloist in the United States, Europe and South America. She has appeared with the English Chamber Orchestra, in recital at Carnegie Hall and on live European television, broadcast from Paris. Sara Sant'Ambrogio's international successes include a 1986 bronze medal at the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Cello Competition in Moscow, resulting in concert tours across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Canada, and her performance in the 1991 GRAMMY award-winning recording of Leonard Bernstein's Arias and Barcaroles.

Christopher Taylor
Tuesday, March 19
8:00 P.M.

SPONSORED BY THE AMERICAN PIANISTS ASSOCIATION

Conference artist Christopher Taylor already had a distinguished career when in April 2000 he was chosen to receive a two-year fellowship awarded by the American Pianists Association in its distinguished Classical Fellowship Awards. In 1993, Taylor was the first American in twelve years to reach the finals of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. After going on to win the Bronze Medal and much attention, his resulting CD also won much acclaim. In April 1996, Taylor joined an elite group of preeminent musicians when he received an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

In the summer of 1990, Taylor was one of the first four recipients of the Gilmore Young Artists Award. Shortly thereafter, he took first prize in the William Kapell International Piano Competition held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Since his first solo recital at 10, he has performed in many cities, including New York (at both Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls), Boston, Washington, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles, as well as in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. He has appeared with the St. Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the National Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Seoul Philharmonic and numerous other orchestras. During a busy 1998-1999 season, Taylor made debuts with the Detroit Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Minnesota Orchestra's Piano Extravaganza.

Taylor began his piano studies in his native Boulder, Colorado, under Julie Bees, and has since studied with Francisco Aybar, Russell Sherman and Maria Curcio Diamond. While pursuing his musical career, he also attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude in mathematics in 1992. Taylor maintains many other interests, including composition--a field in which he has won several awards--music, theory and linguistics. He is a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.